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The Old Guy's Garden Record
Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. Sunday, January 1, 2023 - Happy New Year
It's winter outside, but I'll be starting some plants for this year's garden this month. Egg carton petunias and vinca for hanging baskets will get early starts while our geraniums and onions will be seeded towards the middle or late in the month. I may even start some gloxinia seed, just to check germination on the seeds we've saved this year. When to Start Seeds
Below is an image of part of the readout from the Johnny's Seed-Starting Date Calculator. Clicking on the image will load a PDF of the full file including flowers.
All of the above assumes that you might want to start your own transplants. Our how-to, Growing Your Own Transplants, tells how we start our transplants. But beware! It's sort of addicting! I brought home some delicious Chinese food from China Wok, where one of our daughters worked in their old location. The food, as usual, was great. But then my lovely wife, Annie, zonked out just an hour later, leaving me to what? So I did what garden writers do. I wrote some, but also edited and updated a bunch of our how-to and feature articles.
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. It usually tells me when to seed and how (light, total darkness, optimal temperature for good germination). My copy is an 
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Instead of doing any worthwhile gardening the last few days, I've continued to update web pages, correcting grammar and fixing links that have expired. One page I sadly updated was our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers. I dropped two longtime suppliers out of our Trusted Suppliers classification into the lesser category, Others to Consider. Neither sent us a print seed catalog this year. And one was a little chippy when I protested. Names? Nope! Neither seed house will receive any links here until they rectify their catalog (and customer service) practices. I learned long ago that no mention is often worse for some entities that believe that "any news is good news."
They got sold and moved south, only to end up in bankruptcy. The Jung Seed Company bought the name and rescued the brand. I'd thought from Shumway's apparently dormant site that Jung was going to let the name die. But the new catalog appeared today and still has the old size and feel with many woodcut drawings illustrating it. They also still sell Reid's Yellow Dent open pollinated field corn which we successfully grew on the farm many years in the 1980s. It was on the pages of previous Shumway catalogs that we were introduced to favorites such as Eclipse peas, Sugar Cube and Roadside Hybrid cantaloupe, and Trillion seedless watermelon. Even though I'm done ordering and looking at the Shumway catalog is a bit of nostalgia, I'll probably find something to order in it.
Thursday, January 5, 2023 - Starting Egg Carton Petunias
Leaning toward a bit of nostalgia, I start them in egg cartons as my late mother did many years ago. Once the seed germinates and has a few days to mature, the egg cartons sit neatly on the sill of one of our kitchen windows. Rather than do a how-to here, I'll give you a link to last year's planting which I documented rather well. I will note here that today I planted an egg carton each (twelve cells) of Supercascade and Double Cascades. Starting the plants this early produces lovely blooms in March through July. But by mid-summer, the plants have often worn themselves out. So if you want petunia baskets all summer long, starting more petunias in say, April, should give you some nice fall petunia baskets.
I really like my current camera equipment. But shooting right into the sun is beyond the camera and even Photoshop's ability to correct poor timing and composition. Starting Vinca
The seed went onto sterilized planting mix in fourpack inserts and was lightly covered with vermiculite. The fourpacks went into the tray over a soil heating mat that holds the egg carton petunias I started yesterday. I did reset the thermostat to 76°F. The vinca shots both left and right are from seed vendors. For some reason, I don't have any good vinca shots clearly identified by variety. Seed Orders
There is one more order yet to come in. In a bit of nostalgia, I sent an order to R.H. Shumway yesterday.
Today's mail held a copy of the 2023 John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds catalog. I couldn't find a current digital version of it on their web site, so I appreciate the print copy. Scheepers catalog has few drawings of varieties, but good descriptions. Better, it has good prices and a reasonable minimum shipping fee. I sort of expected to see a seed catalog in the mail this week from the vendor who had left us out and whose customer service representative had gotten a little chippy about me wanting a print catalog earlier in the fall. Apparently, they really don't want my business!
Sunday, January 8, 2023 - Trailing Impatiens
Starting Red Zeppelin Onions During the 2021 gardening season, I noticed some web sites offering plants for the Red Zeppelin hybrid onion variety. I had thought that the excellent variety had been discontinued. When I found seed for the variety in 2022 offered on the Hazzard's Seeds site, I ordered some even though they were expensive and it was well past time to start onion seed.
Note that for trays for onions, I fill a slotted 1020 tray with potting mix. Because of the weight of a tray full of moist potting soil and also to catch water runoff, the slotted tray goes into a heavy duty, solid PermaNest tray. I'm really hopeful we'll get a good stand of Red Zeppelins, as they are probably the best red onion for size, production, and storage that we've ever grown. Also, I'm out of onion seed for some of the good, open pollinated red onion varieties we often grow. From my 2014 Onion Trials page:
Tradescantia Zebrina
So today, I moved the cuttings I'd taken from the plant last month into hanging basket pots. One of the hanging baskets will eventually replace the once glorious, but now failing kitchen plant. I'm still having trouble using the more socially acceptable name tradescantia zebrina instead of the older name, Wandering Jew plant. Can't we just rename it "a pretty plant?" Plant Rack
I began moving gloxinia plants that have been reluctant to move into dormancy to the bottom shelf of the rack. I have several gloxinia plants that seem to be maturing seed. Putting trays of onion plants there has proved to be a no-no, as our cats take them to be auxiliary litter boxes. I'll soon need the room opened up for our spring transplants. The soil heating mats are important for germinating the petunias, vinca, impatiens, and onions over them. Our basement plant room runs at about 55-60°F this time of year. Those temperatures are great for the onions, garlic, and butternut squash stored in darker areas of the room, but not so good for germinating seed. I think this is the earliest I've ever fired up the whole plant rack in years. But..maybe that's a good sign for our 2023 gardening season.
Tuesday, January 10, 2023 - Asparagus We were blessed with a rather warm (55°F), sunny day today without a lot of wind. I took advantage of the nice weather and began cleaning up our raised asparagus bed. Clearing away the old asparagus stalks helps prevent disease and insect carryover. I'm really not sure how one would pick asparagus in a year when the previous year's stalks hadn't been removed.
The cut stalks went beside our working compost pile. I began the process of forking partially digested compost onto the asparagus stalks. While I often don't turn our compost piles, I resolved to do so at least once this winter to speed decomposition and possibly kill seeds in the compost. I also sprinkled some fertilizer and lime over the compost pile. I still need to rake the raised bed and hopefully cover it with compost from our old, fully digested compost pile. Asparagus loves compost! Once I'm done with our raised asparagus bed, I'll need to clear the stalks and weeds from Bonnie's Asparagus Patch which we began taking care of ten or so years ago. It too will get some fertilizer and compost. Our how-to, Growing Asparagus, tells about how to start and care for an asparagus patch. Petunias! A few of the Double Cascade petunias I seeded on Thursday are up! You have to look carefully to see them in the image below, but they're there.
As the petunias were our first seeding of the new season, I'm pretty excited about the quick germination of one of the varieties seeded.
The disaster of incredible rainfall out west continues. Images on the evening news show terrible conditions that have claimed many lives and destroyed lots of property.
Today's release of the U.S Drought Monitor shows some relief from drought out west, although areas of extreme and exceptional drought remain.
Whether or not the extreme conditions out west resolve water problems there is still uncertain.
The local Weather Underground reporting station we mostly use for such data reports 1.86 inches of precipitation so far this month. With an additional two and a half inches predicted over the next ten days, we should be in good shape water table wise. Beyond the weather, we're getting fairly good germination on some of the flower varieties I've started. Only our Supercascade petunias aren't germinating so far. That seed was from 2018, so I may get burnt on that one. The decision of whether or not to order fresh seed or go with older seed we've had frozen is always a tough one.
Their catalog has lots of small photos of their items offered with even smaller print in the item descriptions. I had to get out my computer glasses to read their variety descriptions. Staying with that motif, their prices for seed packets and shipping rates are unexpectedly low! And their Dave's Garden Watchdog rating is pretty good.
Sunday, January 15, 2023 - Sage I moved sage plants from deep sixpack inserts to four inch pots yesterday. The sage seeded on December 7 were just barely showing roots out of the bottom of the sixpacks. I'll use the sage plants as corner and possibly halfway markers around our large East Garden plot.
Onions
There are a few bare spots in the rows that I may need to re-seed. And some white, fuzzy mold began showing up on the soil surface. A quick watering with Captan took care of it. Something I've Noticed and A Trip to the Cardiologist
Prices for Pro-Mix and peat moss went nuts last year. Some vendors are still charging five times the price for those items compared to prices before the pandemic. And many stores simply had no peat moss in stock. I was a bit worried about the price and lack of availability of the products. Peat moss makes growing melons on our heavy clay soil in our East Garden possible. But I noticed some vendors have reduced prices to about double what they were two years ago. I had to be in Terre Haute on Friday for a checkup with my cardiologist. At my wife's insistence, I'd told the doc at my annual checkup about some chest pain I experienced when hoeing a bed for garlic last month. The doc went nuts and ordered a bunch of tests that ran about two grand after insurance. As it turned out, I'm fine. (Of course, at 74 years old, I could drop dead this afternoon!
When I transplanted the sage yesterday, I used some of the Pro-Mix. I was also relieved to see several Menard's stores having a good stock of peat moss priced about double what it used to be. Hopefully, other vendors will drop their prices on such products..
Monday, January 16, 2023 - Texas Nachos
As the ingredients warmed, I realized that the chili didn't have as much hamburger as I would like. So I thawed, chopped, and browned a thin hamburger patty from the freezer and added it to the chile picante mix. It made for a delicious and filling lunch. I'm on hold starting any more seed until the flower and onion seeds I have over our soil heating mats finish germinating. Once that happens, I'll move on to seeding another tray of onions and our geraniums.
Thursday, January 19, 2023 - Starting More Onions
I started a tray of Red Zeppelin onions on January 8. I did that early start as I was unsure of the quality of the seed I had. I re-seeded a few bare spots yesterday, but overall got fairly good germination from the seed. Today's start of onions is our main one. I seeded rows of Clear Dawn and Yellow of Parma as our yellow storage onions. A half row of short day Red Creoles may give us some small, early, red onions. And I'm hoping a half row of some old Southport White Globe seed will germinate better than it did last year. In addition, I also started a row of Walla Wallas. The planting was pretty much standard as I describe in our how-to, How We Grow Our Onions. Apple Cuttings
The Geneva 222 rootstock was developed from a cross of Robusta 5 x Malling 27. It's a semidwarfing rootstock with good cold hardiness, resistance to fire blight, Phytophthora root rot, and wooly apple aphid. Since we've lost trees to both fire blight and Phytophthora root rot, I'm hoping to graft some apple varieties onto the rootstock someday. I took scions from a volunteer apple tree just off our property where we used to dump cull apples. When the tree produces, its apples are rather small, but have a delicious flavor mix of red delicious and Stayman Winesap.
Friday, January 20, 2023 - Starting Geraniums
I started our geraniums this morning. Because I'd not ordered fresh seed, we may come up short on geraniums this year. I started about five seeds each of Maverick Red, Pinto Mixed, Pinto White to Rose, and ten seeds of Summer Showers on white coffee filters. The bagged seeds went onto a heated tray on our plant rack. The Summer Showers variety is an ivy leaf geranium which is good for hanging baskets. I've tried growing ivy leaf geraniums several times, but only got good results once several years ago. Over the years, I've found that geranium seed germinates a little better with some light. Bottom heat also helps. The soil heating mat under the geraniums is set to 75°F, as our basement runs a bit cool this time of year. I usually put most of our geraniums at the corners of our raised garden beds. If I run short of the twelve plants required for that job, I'll probably use Vincas at some of the corners.
Saturday, January 21, 2023 - Starting Dianthus and Parsley
I used a couple of old pop bottle bottom reinforcers for the planting, filling them with recently sterilized potting mix. The dianthus seed got a very light sprinkle of vermiculite over it, as dianthus seed needs light for good germination. The parsley seed got covered with vermiculite, as it doesn't require light for germination. The image at left was taken before the applications of vermiculite.
The planting of parsley seed was a mix of several large leaved varieties. I find it necessary to collect and dry parsley every or every other year. When dried and crunched, the parsley looks like a lot in its jar, but gets used up quickly in several dishes we make that call for a quarter cup of parsley.
I got a pleasant surprise yesterday afternoon. Some of the geranium seed I started on Friday had sprouted. I moved eighteen of the twenty-five seeds started from their coffee filters to three inch pots filled with Sterile Potting Mix. I also noticed this morning that the dianthus and parsley I seeded on Saturday are showing some germination already. Parsley can often be slow to germinate.
I brought in rosemary
I filled our Droll Yankees Bird Feeder (Walmart, Amazon) again this morning. It's a rather expensive feeder, but ours has lasted for years where previous cheaper feeders lasted only a year or two. With the cost of the feeder, I took extra care in hanging it. I wrapped cloth around a high branch on an oak tree and used a chain to hang the feeder about five feet off the ground. Since our dogs can be rather aggressive with squirrels and with the feeders location, we haven't had any squirrel raids that I know of. Onions Our second tray of onions started on January 19 are pretty much up. I re-seeded just a few bare spots in the planting this morning. A pleasant surprise in the planting was that some 2020 Southport
White Globe seed germinated fairly well! Onion seed typically keeps well for only a year or so, even in a freezer .
Garden Seed Donations An email from one of our affiliated advertisers today heralded their seed donation program. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an application page on their site. But if you run a school or community garden and need seeds, this is the time of year to make a request. Below are some quality seed vendors with seed request pages.
An email today from affiliate David's Cookies Evening Sky
The Exchange Yearbook isn't your typical seed catalog. While it has a lovely cover, the interior is all black and white listings. But if you're hunting for an obscure open pollinated vegetable variety, the Exchange is the place to look. Shown at right is page 380 of the Yearbook. It's a page of red tomato varieties including at the bottom of the first column, our listing for the Crimson Sprinter variety. You may note that all of our listings carry the year the seed was produced. Since I wasn't able to plant our large East Garden plot last spring, seed for several of our tomato varieties listed was produced in 2021. Since we keep our seed frozen, I'm confident in offering it and also planting it this spring. Below is my listing for the excellent Earlirouge tomato variety. While the Yearbook shows only me offering seed for the variety, the Online Exchange has three listings. I find that to be a good thing, as it helps ensure the survival of the once endangered variety. And, the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative grew out some of our seed several years ago and continues to offer the variety.
I was disappointed at the late arrival of this year's Yearbook. I've fussed with Seed Savers over that and several other issues over the years. I wonder if the annual lateness of the Yearbook's publication may be so it doesn't compete with SSE's seed sales! Of more concern was the data published on page 486 of the Yearbook. While the numbers of unique varieties listed and total listings continue to hold up well, the number of listers is the lowest since SSE began collecting such data (in 1985). I suspect that's a result of we older members and seed savers dying off! Our Seed Listings for 2023
Quinte Tomatoes (70) - Also known as Easy Peel, our Quinte plants produced unusually large tomatoes in great volume in 2021. Quintes are another Jack Metcalf variety. As with most of his releases, they are an early, semi-determinate, open pollinated plant. GSN SSE TTSI
Our how-to, Growing Tomatoes, tells all about how we grow our tomatoes.
Note that I often add some ERS peppers to our Hungarian Paprika peppers when making ground paprika. Here's a tip from our Growing Peppers how-to that suggests a solution if your pepper plants don't perform well for you. For years, our pepper plants looked good right up until the time they set fruit. Then they'd languish and eventually die. On a luckshot, I began adding a little Maxicrop
We use JLPs for pickles and pickle relish. They're also good for slicing, although not quite as good as pure slicing varieties. Note that JLPs require trellising, as the vigorous vines grow over five feet tall. Since we grow our JLPs as a succession crop after our tall, early peas, they grow between a five foot tall double trellis. GSN SSE
Note that the squash make absolutely fabulous butternut squash yams. Seed produced in 2022. Germination test 12/2022: 90% GSN
Our Gloxinia blog tells all about how to grow these beautiful flowers. Removed from this year's listings are the excellent spinach, Abundant Bloomsdale, and red kidney beans. Our spinach plants perversely produced mostly male plants last year, limiting our seed production. I accidentally let some weed killer drift onto our row of kidney bean plants. I was lucky any of the plants survived. Pricing I realized at some point that I was getting eaten up by Paypal and GSN fees along with the cost of postage and seed envelopes, not to mention the cost of producing the seeds. So that I wasn't subsidizing people's seed requests, I jacked up the price of all of our seed offerings to $6.50 a packet postpaid (even to Canada).
Monday, January 30, 2023 - Saving Wax Paper Coffee Cups
The cutworm collars save us a lot of grief from cutworms. I prefer the Dixie brand of coffee cups because they are sturdy and also since they're made in the United States. Re-seeding I found it necessary today to re-seed some of our vinca and trailing impatiens. I also started soaking milkweed seed and brought in our celery seed to soak before planting. The Turtle Tree Seed Initiative and Camphill Village
Besides helping us preserve the Quinte and Earlirouge tomato varieties, Turtle Tree is part of Camphill Village and employs many residents of Camphill Village, an integrated community where people with developmental differences are living a life of dignity, equality, and purpose. Since much of my teaching career was working with students with disabilities, I really appreciate Turtle Tree and what they do. The Turtle Tree seed catalog is mostly a black and white listing of seeds they sell. There is a center page of color photos for those of us who like pictures of vegetables. One More Seed Order After moving geranium seeds off of the coffee filters where they germinated, we lost several of the plants. That motivated me to order packets of Maverick and Pinto geranium seed from True Leaf Market. It remains to be seen if anything from the Turtle Tree catalog will tempt me. Chores While doing several morning chores, I took the time to fill our bird feeder once and spread seed around our shallow well twice. I was rewarded both times with a swarm of male cardinals gobbling up the mostly sunflower seed. I also put some dogfood out on the back porch. While it's for the dogs, red bellied woodpeckers seem to prefer the dogfood over bird seed!
Tuesday, January 31, 2023 - January Wrap-up
We had a major disaster this month in Saving Gloxinia Seed. I hadn't pollinated enough flowers to save a lot of seed, but we had some seed drying on top of a high bookshelf in a paper bowl. One morning I saw the bowl upside down on the floor. Our new kitten had somehow dumped the bowl with all its seed going into the carpet and a dog bed. Now, we're down to one large pollinated seed head to give us at least some gloxinia seed saved for the season. Fortunately, we have thousands of gloxinia seeds in our freezer from years past. The seed stores well when thoroughly dried and frozen.
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soluble seaweed powder to my transplant solution for the peppers. Our pepper problems magically vanished. Apparently the seaweed had some necessary element in it that our soil lacked. Maxicrop is a bit expensive, but it doesn't take much of it to do the trick.
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