Senior Gardening: One of the Joys of Maturity

A couple of orders from Walmart came in yesterday. The first was a heavy box of Gehl's Nacho Cheese Sauce for our annual Super Bowl treat of Texas Nachos. Gehl's stopped selling their retail sized boxes of cheese sauce several years ago, but their sauce makes the difference in our Texas Nachos. So I ordered what was available, two fifty ounce packages of the cheese sauce. That comes out to 6.25 pounds of the stuff.

The second Walmart order was a pickup order correcting a mistake with our original order. I'd ordered three heavy duty Perma-Nest trays, but only got one in the first pickup. The second pickup had the other two. By using Walmart's ship-to-store option, I saved a few bucks on shipping. The trays are really expensive ($10-12 each) compared to standard seed flats, but I've built up a good supply of them by ordering one or two (or three) each year. While durable, these plastic trays can get brittle if left out in the sun too much. I broke three of ours this last season by dropping or stepping on them.

I'd guess a lot of folks are just now getting around to ordering garden seed for next season. We have to order at least some of ours early, as we start petunias and vincas for hanging baskets, seed geraniums, onions, and some herbs in January.

With some time on my hands yesterday, I put together a couple of tables that may or may not prove helpful in gardeners' selection of seed vendors. All of the companies listed below are included on our listing of Recommended Seed Suppliers. That means I think they're one of the good guys among garden seed vendors.

There is a bit of inherent unfairness in this comparison. Some of the orders crossed two holidays and weekends. Others did not. Some companies were generous in allowing employees days off during the holidays. One, Fedco Seeds, clearly stated on their site that they would not begin filling orders until January 2, 2020.

Time to Fill Seed Orders This Year
Company	Date Order Placed	Date Order Received	Days to fill order
Burpee Seeds	December 12, 2019	December 14, 2019	2
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds	December 12, 2019	December 16, 2019	4
Johnny's Selected Seeds	December 23, 2019	December 27, 2019	4
Fedco Seeds	December 14, 2019	January 6, 2020	4*
Turtle Tree Seed Initiative	December 23, 2019	December 28, 2019	5
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange	December 12, 2019	December 23, 2019	11
Seed Savers Exchange	December 23, 2019	January 4, 2020	12
Stokes Seeds	December 23, 2019	January 13, 2020	21**
Twilley Seeds	December 12, 2019	January 8, 2020	27**
* Fedco began shipping orders January 2 ** Processing of order only began after I contacted company and complained

I tried to figure out a way to include shipping charges in the table above, but it wouldn't fit without really reducing the print size. Then I thought it might be helpful to show folks what my actual shipping charges were for each order I placed along with the sellers' published shipping rates. Note that the arrows by some sellers indicate that charges can go up or down with the dollar value of the order.

I found a couple of years ago that when ordering heavy stuff such as bean, pea, or sweet corn seed from the Seed Savers Exchange, their shipping is cheaper on mail orders. When I called to inquire about the difference in shipping rates, a very polite customer service agent told me that online orders are computed by shipping weight while the standard shipping charge applies to mail orders.

It's not a bad idea to do a web search for coupon or promo codes for free shipping or other discounts from seed houses. Such offers become pretty scarce towards spring. And even reliable seed houses fudge a bit with ads and emails advertising "Free Shipping," when the offer is often free shipping on orders of $50, $60, or even far more from some seed houses.

One can grow good onions in the garden starting with onion sets, purchased onion plants, or by starting seed to grow ones own transplants. We've done it all three ways over the years, using purchased onion plants last year for our sweet onions that failed to germinate. But for cost and the availability of many onion seed varieties, we choose to grow our own onion transplants each year.

Over the past five years, we've started our onions at some point in January. When doing some extensive (for us) Onion Trials in 2014, I did start a test tray in early December, but followed it up with later plantings in January and early February.

I plant our onions in rows in seed flats running down the longest flat dimension. Since standard 1020 seed flats are rather flimsy and a full tray of wet potting soil is rather heavy, we used to double our seed flats for better strength, using a slotted tray inside a solid tray. A few years ago, we switched to a standard, slotted seed flat in a heavy duty Perma-Nest plant tray.

I had "sterilized" some planting medium several days ago in anticipation of this planting. Since a seed flat takes just over half a kettle of potting mix, I had to sterilize some more this morning to plant two flats of onions. Our sterile potting mix this time was a half and half mix of commercial potting soil and Pro-Mix. Often, it's a mix of potting soil and peat moss. Since Pro-Mix and peat moss can run a bit acid, I add a sprinkle of lime to the mix.

I baked the mix in the oven in a heavy stainless steel pot at 400° F for an hour and a half to kill any potential damping off fungus. If you've ever had newly started plants topple over at the base, often with a light circle or thinning at the base of the stem where they fell over, you've probably experienced damping off, a fungus sometimes present in commercial potting mixes. One can get around the problem by using soilless starter mixes or by sterilizing the mix yourself.

After filling the seed flats with sterile potting mix, I water the soil with very warm, non-softened water before seeding. Pro-Mix and peat moss will absorb warm water, but resist absorbing cold water. I let the soil cool down before placing any seed in it.

To plant, I make four quarter inch deep furrows lengthwise down the seed flats with a ruler. Most any straight edge will do the job. In a pinch, I once used our cheese grater to make the furrows! The tool really isn't important. A straight furrow of the proper depth is what you want.

I label each row at either end with an inexpensive plastic label. Note that we reuse our plastic plant labels year after year by soaking them in a bleachwater solution for a few days to remove the permanent marker labeling on them. The bleach and a little scrubbing removes almost all of the marker, and the bleach sterilizes the labels.

I do my best when seeding onions to space the seed at half inch intervals in the rows. "My best" usually means one could find three seeds on top of each other in places, but almost no gaps in the row. I'd rather thin than reseed.

Onion seed should germinate well at room temperature. Since our basement plant room runs a little cool this time of year, I put our trays of onion seed on thermostatically controlled soil heating mats set to 75° F. The trays were covered with clear humidity domes to hold in heat and soil moisture. The soil heating mats and trays are under our plant lights so that early germinating seed will get some light.

I'll probably not have to water the trays until the seed germinates, but might have to mist the soil with Captan if any moss or mold begins to form on the soil surface.

We have a nice mix of seed for our onion planting this year. Since onion seed doesn't store very well beyond a year, six of the nine varieties seeded are from fresh seed. When I did our seed inventory in December, I pitched a lot of old onion seed.

For sweet onions, we'll rely again on the old open pollinated favorite, Walla Walla. Last year's Walla Wallas were grown from plants purchased at Walmart as our supposedly fresh Walla Walla seed failed to germinate properly. While our sweet onions were smaller than usual, they stored far longer than sweet onions usually do.

Our yellow storage onions include the open pollinated Yellow of Parma and Clear Dawn varieties. We'll also grow some Milestone hybrids, a consistently good performer.

For red storage onions, we're trying the Red Bull hybrid for the first time. We grew the open pollinated Red Sunset variety for the first time last year and were quite satisfied with it. We'll also grow some open pollinated Rossa di Milano (if the 2018 seed germinates) and Red Creole varieties. Red Creole is a short day variety more suited for growing in the south. Here in west central Indiana, our Red Creoles mature early producing small but flavorful onions a full month before our other varieties mature.

Note that one could direct seed onions into their garden plot, but I don't recommend it. The onions get a late start that way and won't mature until fall. Also, baby onion starts are small and would require a lot of careful weeding around them.

The rain has finally stopped. We ended up getting just a little less than three inches of precipitation in two days. The creek just down the road from us has overflowed its banks, but isn't over the bridge on the road over it. There's standing water in lots of places where there usually isn't.

While it's cold outside today, our extended forecast shows some fairly nice days coming this week. I still need to remove the stalks from our asparagus patch, remove some mulch from our main raised bed, and do something with some surviving spinach I haven't had the heart to pull in one of our narrow raised beds.

Inside, I've sterilized potting mix for an anticipated planting of onions this week. I also did some cleaning of our downstairs plant room, as I hadn't swept up spilled potting mix there for some time. And I pulled our sage and vinca starts off the heat mat and moved them closer under a plant light.

I also realized last week that I hadn't been saving paper coffee cups to use in the spring as cutworm collars. So I started bringing in my used coffee cups from road trips, rinsing and drying them, saving them for their spring duty.

It's raining bucketfulls today. I knew it was going to storm last night, as one of our dogs, Petra, heads for the landing on the stairs just before storms roll in. She's a rescue dog that apparently developed a fear of storms before she was picked up and placed in the Gibson County Animal Shelter. My softhearted wife, Annie, adopted Petra a day before the dog was scheduled to be euthanized. Petra has turned out to be one of the best and most lovable dogs we've ever had.

The Weather folks on TV are saying we could be getting up to 3-5 inches of rain before this is all over.

I'd hoped to start onions today, but still don't have all the onion seed I need. Stoke Seeds continues to delay shipping my order for some reason. Only after sending Stokes President Wayne Gayle a rather terse COB message this afternoon, I received notification that our order is ready to go out (Shipping Label Created). That doesn't mean that the Post Office has it in their system, it just means that someone at Stokes finally created a shipping label.

Of our four longest running seed suppliers (Burpee Seeds, Johnny's Selected Seeds, Stokes Seeds, and Twilley Seeds), two (Stokes and Twilley) have given us really unsatisfactory buying experiences this year. Only the fact that we've had a mostly satisfactory relationship with all four for over forty years gives me cause not to add the two to my When Hell Freezes Over list of companies I will never do business with again.

Of course, the old saying that one should never say never comes to mind as I write this section. Don Henley's line that later named an Eagles' live album and their most successful tour may also figure into this thought process. "The album name is in reference to a quote by Don Henley after the band's breakup in 1980. Henley was asked in an interview about when the band would play together again, to which he responded 'when Hell freezes over.'" (Credit: Wikipedia) At the beginning of the concert recorded for the Eagle's Hell Freezes Over album, the late Glenn Frey joked to the audience: "For the record, we never broke up; we just took a 14-year vacation."

Courtesy of a couple of our kids, Annie and I got to see an Eagles concert in 2018. Sadly, Glenn Fry had passed by that time, but his oldest son, Deacon Frey, and country star Vince Gill took over Frey's vocals in excellent fashion. It was a great concert.

Not able to start anything today, I really should stop rambling and write something about gardening.

When we start our flower, herb, and vegetable transplants from seed is based on past experience and also from a very helpful interactive tool from Johnny's Selected Seeds, their Seed-Starting Date Calculator. Entering an average frost free date obtained from Dave's Garden, the seed-starting calculator yields a long list of vegetables and flowers with date ranges of when to start them. Sadly, the Johnny's calculator isn't all inclusive, as it only lists stuff they sell seed for. Online searches supplemented by research in the late Nancy Bubel's excellent The New Seed Starter's Handbook usually tells us when to seed and how (light, total darkness, optimal temperature for good germination).

You'll notice that I've entered our local frost free date in the image of the calculator above.

While an image above shows our garden surrounded by fog, it has cleared now...only because it's raining like crazy again.

To my pleasant surprise, the dianthus I seeded on Monday are up already. It appears that we may get about two dozen plants from the seeding, possibly far more than I'll need. Although planted from seed saved in 2016 and 2017, our dianthus go back to a packet of Carpet Series Mixed dianthus purchased in 2008. The carpet series produces lovely plants with a variety of colors, although reds dominate. While classed as biennials, we often have plants bloom into their third year.

When I did the seeding on Monday, I was surprised at the vials of dianthus seed we'd saved over the years. If you'd like to try some, send me an email request that includes your mailing address.

While two dozen dianthus sounds like a lot to me now, I ran across a photo from 2013 when I transplanted dianthus from a communal pot to seventy-two cells!

Double Cascade petunia starts in egg cartons

Our egg carton petunias that I brought upstairs this week seem to love their kitchen windowsill. They're putting on good growth, although I'm having to be careful to water them as needed. So far, that watering has been every other day. Because of the small egg cell size, I'll soon be watering them every day.

While sometimes listed as trailing petunias, I've found that our Supercascades and Double Cascades have a pretty upright growth. But they do really well in hanging baskets on our back porch.

After patiently waiting for an unfilled order from December 12 with Twilley Seeds, I began to raise a little polite hell with them over the weekend. That produced a brusque response from them, but also got my order out the door and into my hands this week.

Another go-to seed supplier over the years, Stokes Seeds, has similarly failed this year to get our order to us. I filed an online order on December 23, an obviously poor time to do an online order with the holidays. Needing a couple of onion varieties I should plant right now, I wrote their customer service (without response) and then their president. I got a prompt email response from President Wayne Gayle and a phone call from a customer service person who said my order was being processed. Alas, the order still remains in limbo. Orders with Johnny's Selected Seeds and the Turtle Tree Seed initiative filed the same day as the Stokes order arrived in just four or five days.

I've long recommended that the Seed Savers Exchange should get their annual exchange yearbook of member offerings out at a reasonable time to be useful for their members. We got our yearbook last year in late January, an improvement over past years, but still a totally unacceptable date for the yearbook to be truly useful to their members. We're still waiting on our yearbook.

I didn't have the energy or time to get this up yesterday. I took our sometimes daily splashshot of our raised garden beds late in the afternoon with the sun low in the sky. Late, by winter standards. The sun was clearly in the photo, but what I took turned out to be fairly pretty. While the winter sun is still low in the sky, but we're gaining minutes of daylight each day.

I downloaded the 2020 Victory Seeds catalog yesterday. I haven't received a paper print version of it yet, possibly because of a lack of recent orders on my part. Also, Victory Seeds always sends their catalog out a good bit later than many other seed vendors, generally after I've placed my seed orders.

The catalog cover this year is stunningly beautiful. It is probably the best of the bunch of seed catalog covers I've looked at this year!

Victory Seeds is a truly family owned and operated business specializing in older and heirloom seed varieties. Their sixty-four page catalog offers eighteen pages of tomato varieties! There are also lots of bean (and other) varieties offered.

I took a look at the 2020 Botanical Interests seed catalog online today. It doesn't offer a download link. Again, I didn't get a paper version, as we haven't ordered from them since 2014. We did get some nice garlic with that order.

Botannical Interests offers a nice selection of open pollinated vegetable varieties.

I suspect a lot of hard work by photographers, artists, and layout folks goes into creating seed catalog covers. Below are the covers from the mainline seed houses we frequently order from. Clicking on a cover image will open a larger version of it in a new tab or window. Clicking on the name of the seed house should take you to their home page.

I started a few things yesterday. I seeded trailing impatiens, vinca, dianthus, and sage. The impatiens and vinca are for hanging baskets. I'll seed more vinca in a few weeks to go into our garden. The dianthus just takes a long time to develop and flower. I used seed saved in 2016 and 2017 for that planting. The sage is for replacement plants in our East Garden. We use sage there as corner and halfway markers for the plot. Sadly, the sage plants I brought inside appear to have all died, necessitating the seeding today.

The impatiens dianthus, and sage all need light to germinate. So their seed got sprinkled across the top of the soil and lightly covered with vermiculite. The vinca requires total darkness to germinate. So it got a heavy layer of vermiculite over the seed and its pot covered with a piece of black plastic. All four four inch starter pots went into a tray over a soil heating mat set at 76° F.

It certainly isn't a gardening item, but I ordered TurboTax 2019 today from Sam's Club. Intuit is sponsoring a $10 off sale that runs through January 11. If you're not a Sam's Club member, Amazon is also participating in the special pricing.

Note: After checking some other online outlets, it appears that not all of them are participating in the sale. Some had TurboTax priced as much as $20 more than the sale price at Sam's and Amazon!

After one of the grayest days yesterday that we've had of late, today is bright and sunny. Sadly, the wind is howling, spoiling a sunny day with fairly moderate temperatures (mid-40s).

The petunias for hanging baskets I started last month in egg cartons were ready to be moved to a kitchen windowsill today. I had a couple of empty egg cells to fill from ones I'd double seeded. And the petunias got a final watering in the tray they've been growing in.

The bottoms of the egg cartons, the part with the egg cells, fits into the egg carton tops which serve as drip pans. I pull the drip pans and pour water into them, replacing the egg cell parts in them. It's sort of hard to describe in words as the egg carton tops become bottoms, and the bottoms with the egg cells fit into the tops.

Because of the small volume of soil in the egg carton cells, the petunias will require watering almost every day. The petunias will remain on the windowsill for about a month before they begin to outgrow their egg carton cells. Then, they'll get transplanted into fourpack inserts and go back under our plant lights, as fourpacks won't fit on the windowsill. After several weeks in fourpacks, they'll get transplanted into hanging baskets.

I'm sure our egg carton petunias may seem like the hard way to do this. But it's a nostalgia thing for me, as my mother used to start plants in egg cartons on our kitchen windowsill. And now, I've come to like having the plants for a month or so in the kitchen.

Having not published a how-to article in over a year, I got busy this week and finished one on Growing Peppers. I'd put off writing this article, as my knowledge about peppers is rather limited. That made for a lot of necessary research and links to folks who really do know about growing peppers.

There's also the painful memory of a really bad experience I had picking hot peppers almost forty years ago. A couple of sage links may give you a hint of my extreme discomfort all those years ago.

I've not grown hot peppers ever since, so my knowledge of them is limited to what I know about growing bell and paprika peppers. Fortunately, the growing requirements are about the same.

Some of the fun in writing such a piece is being able to shower the page with colorful images.

And no, those long red peppers in the image above aren't hot peppers. They're Hungarian Spice Paprika Peppers, a rather mild, but slightly spicy pepper for making ground paprika.