You may remember (and if you don’t, scroll down, it’s not long ago) that I recently ordered seeds to start our vegetable garden. Here is Texas, the last frost date is in mid March, so we get started EARLY. We take a hefty break in the summer when scorching heat kills everything in sight, and replant in the fall. I am hoping to keep the tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs going through the summer; everything else will have to be harvested by the end of May, failing a drastic change for the mild in Texas weather.

This morning, we got out the seed flats and organic seed starter soil we got from Calloway’s. Note: if you want organic produce, all you have to do is use organic products. Eventually we will have our own (organic) compost, but it will take a year or two for that program to really develop. We could have used egg cartons or any number of other containers, but since I will be sharing these little plants with others in our family, I went ahead and sprang for the $15 for the nice looking, reusable 72-plant flats. We have a nice, big light hung up over the flats, and a drain pan beneath them. We planted two varieties of carrots (which promptly got mixed up, because I had little hands helping, but I don’t much care this time around) in one flat, and a whole flat of spinach. We used about half the seeds of each packet, putting 2 or 3 seeds into each little cup of dirt.

When the little seedlings are big enough, we will harden them off by letting them spend a few hours each day outdoors for a week, before planting them in the garden. Before then, we will need to till said garden with our enormous tiller and add about 3″ of organic compost. BTW, how does one create one’s own organic compost? By adding organic material! That’s about it. Funny how something that seems so grand can be so simple. It’s all about the materials you start with. After that, we will start a new round of seedlings inside, this time a mega planting that will include lettuces, beets, herbs, onions, peas, broccoli, radishes and turnip
|Enough people have asked that I feel compelled to give a list of all the vegetable seeds we have.The seed company, Texas Ready, does not publish a list of all the varieties of seeds they supply, since their stock changes a lot depending on what has done well and how much each crop produced. I hope they don’t mind, but I am going to tell you what I got in MY ammo box – I mean, seed bank. What comes in someone else’s bank might be quite different, I don’t know. I sure am excited, though!

Herbs – broadleaf sage, Italian large leaf basil, bouquet dill, long-standing cilantro, chives and Italian giant parsley.

Peppers – cayenne, jalapeno, California wonder and Hungarian hot wax.

Tomatoes – roma, large cherry red, marglobe improved, homestead, rutgers and beefsteak

Giant Noble spinach

Carrots – danvers, imperator, chantenay red core

Greens – white vienna kohlrabi, collards, arugula, Swiss chard, siberian kale, Copenhagen cabbage and all season cabbage

Lettuce – red salad bowl, buttercrunch, oakleaf green, Paris Island romaine

Squash – summer straightneck, spaghetti, Waltham butternut, dark green zucchini, jack o’lantern pumpkins

Melons – rockyford cantaloupe, hales best cantaloupe, honey dew, Charleston grey watermelons

Asparagus – Mary Washington

Radishes – Scarlet globe and white icicle

Turnips – rutabagas and shogoin

Celery – golden pascal

Brussel sprouts – Long Island

Okra – long green pod

Broccoli – Waltham 29 and calabrese

Cucumbers – Armenian dark, spacemaster and straight eight

Eggplant – black beauty

Beets – Detroit red and early wonder

Sunflower – mammoth

Onions – Texas grano 502 and red Creole

Cauliflower – snowball

Mustard – southern giant curl and tendergreen

Corn – yellow dent, truckers’ yellow, white surecropper and ornamental/cornmeal

Soybeans

Beans – Thorogreen lima, golden wax bush, Florida speckled lima, Jackson wonder pole, pinto bush x 2, tenderette bush, Kentucky wonder pole

Peas – wando, colossus, Austrian winter

Cowpeas – southern, cream zipper, purple hull