Seed companies are still being hit hard. Baker Creek shut down their website temporarily. They said between the high order volume, and the staff shortages due to people being quarantined, they just couldn’t keep up.
Normally, I spend weeks going through the catalogs, making a list of everything I’ve marked, checking variety names to see which catalog has the best price for each variety, culling the list until it fits my budget, etc, until I finally order around February. This time around, I’ve been ordering a little recklessly. When Adaptive Seeds unlocked their page and started accepting orders, I got my order in immediately. Same with Cultivariable back in the fall. I’ve been watching certain varieties at Baker Creek, but those were still showing “out of stock”.
I’m in the process of setting up my Seedwise seller account. I’ll probably only have a couple things listed, but one of them will be the Bigger Better Butternut squash. I don’t know exactly how much seed I have yet, because we’re still eating them. Roughly half the crop is left, and shows no signs of deterioration yet. Those are excellent keepers! I’m curious to see how many manage to last the full year that Carol Deppe described, and how sweet they are by that point.
Some exciting projects for this coming year. A plant breeder on the Permies.com forum has promised to send me some landrace breadseed poppy seeds. He has a patch that self-sows, and is aggressive enough to compete with the weeds. He pretty much just harvests the ripe pods, and the plants do everything else on their own. I’m hoping they’ll do the same here.
On the same forum, a bunch of people are brainstorming ideas for an automated biochar-maker that works with crop debris. I have 10 acres (part tillable and part soon-to-be orchard) that I’d like to amend with biochar. But, that’s a LOT of biochar, and I don’t have a lot of wood. What I do have is a ton of crop waste, like chaff and empty bean shells. I’ve been making tiny amounts of biochar from that, but an automated burner would be so much easier!
Stay tuned :)
Thanks for the Head’s Up on the seed supply. No dilly-dallying this season - I already ordered the basics and have seed in hand.
I’ll take what I can get for the rest of the ‘stuff’ I want, not need. ;)
I’ll re-order bare-root roses in the spring. I did have ONE casualty that I know of out of the 15 or so I planted this past season - we’ll see who makes to cut come spring and I’ll re-order accordingly. I had NO Japanese Beetle damage due to feeding them the ‘goop’ they need, 3x last season. It’s just watered in; I want as little maintenance as possible for my roses.
I also decided to do some actual bed ‘plotting’ this season, on paper and everything! I normally just wing it and usually have MORE veggies than I know what to do with, but I feel the need to do a lot of successive planting next season and make good use of every inch.
Beau has already been alerted that I will need beds lightly tilled this upcoming spring, so he needs to have the small tiller in good shape...and I saw that he moved it into the garage to work on, so at least he’s listening, LOL!
I’m up to 14 seed catalogs right now. Happy, Happy!