Monthly Archives: January 2010

…is in!

Wow.

Cherokee purple and brandywine tomatoes, fairytale eggplant (my favorite kind), way more varieties of kale than 2 farmers growing on an acre probably should have ordered, beautiful red and green lettuces, bright lights chard,  chioggia beets, northeaster pole beans, lots of sweet basil, long red narrow cayenne peppers for eating and drying, jimmy nardello sweet peppers (the sweetest you’ll ever taste), plenty of sungolds, flying saucer pattypan squash (those are the green and yellow ones with such gorgeous patterns!), good ol’ sugar snap peas, hakurei turnips, bolero carrots, ruby perfection red cabbage…

Doing the seed order was just as much work as the rest of the crop plan, and just as much fun. After we decided what to grow, and how much to grow, the next step was figuring out how much seed, and which seeds, we would need. A lot more math, in other words. Some things we took into account: the seed rate per 100′ (for direct seeded crops), plants per 100′ (for transplanted crops), how many seeds per cell we’d seed for transplanted crops, germination rates, the cost of the seeds. The fun part was looking through Fedco and Johnny’s and finally getting to pick exactly what we wanted, instead of having someone else tell us what to grow! We made decisions based on our own personal likes and dislikes, flavor, vigor, productivity, ease of growing in our climate, qualities of earliness and late-season hardiness, familiarity and uniqueness…

It’s a big accomplishment. I’m excited. It’s amazing to think that a little box is coming our way via US mail, and that its contents will turn into hundreds of pounds of food…deep purple eggplants, buttery lettuces, juicy tomatoes, sweet golden beets…what an incredible miracle to be a part of.

Laura