I order seeds last weekend, during a blizzard. It was so much fun to think about tasty tomatoes and tall beanstalks while the snow swirled around outside!
Johnny's seed catalog had a really good reference - a table that estimated how much of a given vegetable would grow in 100 ft of bed space. Because of that, I realized that allowing 70 ft for green beans was way too much and was able to re-devote 50 ft of that space to growing dry beans! I'm really excited for this - I don't think they're commonly grown in home gardens, so I didn't think about them until I noticed them in the seed catalogs. We eat a lot of beans and we were able to pick out heirloom varieties that you can't find in the store.
We decided to purchase tomato and pepper starts from our farmer, but we will still be starting celery from seed. This is the only vegetable we will start indoors and then transplant. Since we are growing food to preserve and eat over the winter, we are not concerned about extending the season. Maybe next year? It depends on how this experiment goes!
I ordered from two different companies, just to keep it simple. One of the companies shipped our seed order yesterday, so we will be getting the celery seeds to start soon! I'm going to start a batch in egg cartons when they show up, and we'll see how that goes. They send a crazy amount of celery seeds (probably because they are so difficult to grow) so if the egg carton batch doesn't thrive, we'll have time and seeds left to step up our efforts with the next round.
I am getting SO EXCITED for the growing season!!
