SHOPPING WITH PAPA - SO MANY SEEDS, SO MANY OPTIONS

Unless I am broke, it may be best not to turn me loose in seed store!

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For many gardeners out there, flipping through the pages of a seed catalog can be a fantastic experience. The options and combinations of what to plant are almost endless sometimes, and it can be exciting just to think about.

If you saw my recent post about our trip to the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company then you already know that I was in a giant room lined with seed packets, in their amazing Seed Store! Truth be told, I actually checked out four separate times!.

Since Baker Creek does an amazing job at finding rare and excellent heirloom seeds from all around the world available to your average gardeners, I am always super excited when I get to stop in. Did you realize that almost ¾ of a million gardeners have purchased seeds from this company? Personally, that gives me a lot of hope for the future.

Among my gardening goals are finding which crops will work best for us. Since we moved to the Ozarks less than two years ago, we are still adjusting to the climate ourselves. Having different soil and different temperatures can be a bit to deal with as a gardener. Plants that we once grew in Wisconsin with the greatest of ease now may be difficult to grow.

So far we have been very impressed with a few of the new kinds of food that we have grown. Plants like the Chinese Red Noodle Bean and the Kiwano were ones that we had never even heard of a few years ago. Now, we plan on having them in our garden every year. Finding amazing gems like those makes us very excited to try other plants that we may not have heard of.

The tamarillo was a new plant for us that we got to check out in person at Baker Creek. David Kaiser had become a sort of mascot for the company, and he shared some with the @little-peppers and myself that he picked off of one of their plants. I had never tasted anything quite like it, but some of the flavor reminded me of an apricot. Now, we have a packet of those seeds as well to try growing our own. Hopefully they will work out very well for us.

This one was another good find. The Austrian Winter Pea is a good cover crop and soil builder that can be grown in the winter. The young tendrils can be eaten and enjoyed as a food, but the plant also is great for animals and fixes Nitrogen in the soil, since it is a legume. I've already been planting some and look forward to seeing how they work our for us.

Corn is one of the most heavily GMO'ed crops out there, and I really would rather try to grow my own. Whether it is for tortillas, corn flour or corn meal, popcorn, animal feed, or eating as sweet corn, I'd prefer to grow my own. I'll be experimenting with a few more varieties and comparing them to some that I already like to grow. The varieties out there are amazing, and it makes me sad to think that many people will only see yellow corn in a metal can during their lifetimes.

Growing more of our own other grains will also be something that we look into as we move forward on the homestead. We will be testing a few varieties of wheat soon. Also, we found these interesting carrots, including the Oxheart, which should be a good one for the "soil" that we are currently dealing with.

Some of the main problems that certain gardeners run into is having too many seeds and not enough space or time. While I am optimistic, I am not exactly planning on making sure to grow every one of these varieties next season, but I may try. Hopefully we will at least be able to rule out a few and also find some that do amazing for us.

I think that right now is such an incredible day and age to be a gardener in, because we have access to variety like never before. While many seeds are being manipulated and others lost forever, at least we have a world-wide commerce to interact within. While certain restrictions still prohibit seeds from being moved across certain borders, in many cases we can get a different variety just by clicking a button on our computer, entering a card number, and waiting for the mail. That is very exciting for me!

I'm not sure how many of you tend to go a little overboard when shopping for garden seeds, but I still have not grow out of it. Thankfully, some seeds like cucumbers can last for ten years or more and still germinate. I have always found it to be absolutely amazing that an entire plant with so much produce can be produced from just one tiny seed!

While the packets featured in the photos for this post are not all of the varieties that I purchased, they are some of them. Because we want to be able to provide most of our own food and have extra to share, we will be hard at work in the garden for the rest of our lives. Finding the best varieties for our area is crucial to getting the best return on our investment. I think that it is an added bonus that we only live a few hours from Baker Creek, where they grow these in their garden.

So steemians, tell me. Do you grow any of your own food? If not, would you like to try it one day? If so, what it your all time favorite homegrown crop that produces well for you? Also, have you ever went a little "crazy" on seed shopping?

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-planting-some-already

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Until next time…

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GIF provided by @malos10

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