Gathering my seed preps
 

I am ready to start gathering seeds for my preps. What veggies and flowers (any seed recommendations) do you folks in my growing zone store as future and present use? I know I want non hybrid and I know what I like to eat but I don�t know what will grow in my zone. My zone is south west Tn with my bug out and future home is north east Ark. I will start with a small garden this year. What I would like to grow are
Potato -Irish
Potato -sweet
Green bean
Cabbage
Carrot
Sweet corn
Lettuce
Sweet peas
Bell pepper
Spinach
Squash
Tomatoes
Turnip greens
Watermelon
I have to start some where so I want to plant at least two of each this year to learn how and to know that I can.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

you might finder it easier to start with plants bought at a local store than seeds. you can start somethings now indoors or you could just buy them already started.

burpee.com is a good place to check out the varieties available. you should also check out your local agriculture dept, most likely they have a list of the varieties that do well in your area and the planting times. if you cant find that then check out the gardenweb.com forums and see what does well for others in the Tenneessee forum. those are the varieties you'd want to plant.

for flowers... I love zinnias.. super easy to grow and make nice cut flowers. also sunflowers are tons of fun and can you privacy...... have fun... I cant wait til spring.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

That's too long a list to go over everything right now. What you need is info, and since you need to buy seeds too, why not read the catalogs?

Johnnyseeds.com
http://www.superseeds.com/ (Pine Tree Farm)

http://gardeners.harrisseeds.com/

Or if you want something expensive:
www.seedsofchange.com

Johnny's has the best free info, which is why I start with them. No affiliation and they are a bit pricy but quality. They are also the clearest on hybrid (F1) vs purebred. You seemed to want viable heirloom seeds, which is advisable. Burpee is good but also expensive (fewer seeds per pack) and unclear about the plant needs and hybrids.

Quick rundown:
Warning: Irish potatoes are very hard to grow. They want cool, moist, Peruvian (or PEI) climates. Highly suseptable to many diseases, potato blight, potato bugs, and attract them onto your other plants. They need water and if they don't get it, you can end with only as many potatoes as you started with. They need curing and don't store easily, and are VERY VERY cheap to buy in a bag. Prognosis: BUY THEM.

I have little experience with sweet potatoes as we grow squash. Check out the different varieties tuned to your latitude. They are supposed to be easy to grow but can be big. Perhaps on a trellis to save space?

Green beans: easily purebred but we have not found an excellent non-hybrid. In hybrids get the french types. In purebred I'd lean toward standbys like Kentucky Wonder because the plants have proven hearty.

Cabbage: go ahead and try it, but again, you may want to buy it. There are two types: summer and storage. Know which one. They want cool climates so get a variety for your latitude.

Carrot: far too many to describe, need super-deep, sandy (or compost) soils to be sweet and well-formed.

Sweet corn: many purebreds but the hybrids outdo them in every way, including flavor, ripening period, and storage. Try both and don't be afraid of the little purebreds. Days to ripening means nothing as they don't grow without heat and tend to come in at the same time. If you don't grow fields they must be in square blocks or hills to pollenate, and varieties spaced away from each other.

Lettuce: wonderful lettuces abound, pick your poison. Pelleted seed is ideal. Plant twice but the new types are so slow to bolt it's almost unneded. Look for cold-weather "corn salad" types to extend the season.

Sweet peas: buy edible pods, almost everything is good, but tune to your area because they can get woody too fast in heat.

Bell pepper: these can be started or direct-sown but buy plants at first. Bells are fussy compared to bananas in my opinion.

Spinach: eat weeds like Lamb's quarters which are growing in the garden anyway. Replace with red swiss chard. "Spinach" is a dozen different species but is fussy, can get bitter, small to pick, bolts, etc. Chard is foolproof.

Squash: Summer or winter? There are only a few purebred summers: yellow crookneck and an italian zucchini. Almost everything else is F1. A single plant can bury a family but be sure to pick it tiny or eat the flowers. Winter has many purebreds, all good. I favor small hubbard and kobocha, which are dry treats like Idaho potatoes. They are all so good you can just entertain yourself with the shapes, but pay attention to the curing and root-storage, or else slice and dry.

Tomatoes: buy them for your area at first. Jet is underrated but most varieties are very good. Know if you want plums for canning and bruchetta or sloppy-seed eating varieties. They must be planted correctly and sulk terribly afterwards. Heat-activated and need space.

Turnip greens: or collards. Foolproof. If you want to go longer, plant kale and give the same treatment until bitter freeze.

Watermelon: I prefer small varieties so you don't have cut halves lying around. Heat sensitive, they therefore come in all at once like corn and tomatoes do.

Gardening is nothing. You don't do any work: the plants do all the work. What you need to focus on is getting or making perfect soil, whatever it takes. If you do, you can drop seeds and succeed. If not, nothing will work and what grows will taste bad.

Last thing: DON'T be caught up in gardening. It's fun for people who like to work. But if you want to EAT, that's a totally different thing that requires very little work. For that you plant trees, bushes and vines and eat the wild plants of your area. If you make that your basis, then you're so sure to eat you have TIME to goof off in a GARDEN, which per work hour isn't terribly productive in comparison.

For that you might try Musser, Stark, and MillerNursies. For wild plants you might try Elias and Dyke "edible wild plants" and not the Peterson's.

Did I forget anything?

TS

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

www.dirtdoctor.com is a good place for the organic gardener

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

Looks like I�ll be preparing the soil this year and holding seeds till next year. My dirt needs alot of work. Thank you all for the links and suggestions.
Simpleton you really got me thinking. I needed that.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

spend $20 on veggie and herb plants at home depot and plant them. its fun to watch them grow and you may as well get some experience this year.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

Not a bad idea. Why waste a year huh? Thanks angryhippy.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

77, I grew everything on your list in Kentucky. I agree with the suggestions you got like other things being as good as spinach, but easier, and banana peppers really being lots easier than bells but filling the same food niche.

Farm type stores generally have potato eyes or small seed potatoes ready to plant. If you start small you will not overwhelm yourself. 2 of each item was a good idea. If your ground isn't frozen solid, just dig and prepare 1 to 3 feet x 1 foot each weekend and soon you will be planting turnips and potatoes and chard. Tomatoes and squash and watermelon like it warmer. Corn takes a lot of ground, so you might not grow it this year. And don't make my first mistake... the first carrot sprout looks like grass. I weeded up my carrots!!

If the ground has not been gardened you won't know till you try if you have cutworms. They just eat the part at ground level and kill your shoots like they had been trimmed with scissors. A little collar, like 1/4 of a toilet paper cardboard center or something, can protect your baby plants from that.

Potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash and cabbage and carrots are good keepers that can last all winter in good storage. Many things you need to can the extra. Chard is very tough and if you just pick 1 stalk from each plant every week can keep going forever it seems like. Same with green onions.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

I highly recommend this book:

Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times

The author founded Territorial Seeds, so not only does he know a thing or two about growing stuff :wink: but he reveals a lot of the [s]dirty tricks[/s] cost-cutting measures that seed and nursery companies use.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

I'm going to see if our library has that. Some books I want on hand, but our most recent cost reduction is reading from the library first and only buying what we deem reference books.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

These guys are getting their seeds together too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7217821.stm

'Doomsday' seeds arrive in Norway

The first consignment of seeds bound for the "doomsday vault" on Svalbard has arrived in Norway.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

+1 on this. Steve Solomon also has a great resource website, Soil & Health:

http://soilandhealth.org/

Lots of good info there. Steve used to live here in Oregon, he has since moved to Tasmania. I had the pleasure to meet and talk with him about 20 years ago, around the time his other book came out, "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades", which is a great book for those that live in this area. Real nice guy and a bounty of info.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

This brings to mind something I have been doing for a while now. I live in the country. Corn and soybean fields for miles. Lots of old fences that no one uses anymore. Whenever I have extra rooted grape vines(Eating or wine type) I plant the extas out on these old fences. I think about half of them have taken. I've planted a few spruce and Doug fir too. No ones complained but I doubt they know I've done it either

My kids still take their bikes down the road to our nieghbors lane and eat mulberries in the summer. And the wild blackberries are good too.

If good cultivars were mixed in with the wild varieties there will be lots of food available just for the picking.

Sometimes I think I have way too much time on my hands.

SB

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

Happened to run across "Fiat Money Inflation in France" by Andrew Dickson White today.

Believe me when I tell you, you may be saving lives. If not, well, no harm, no foul, eh?

Don't worry about anything, shovel, just plant best you can, you'll need the experience.

TS

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

Irish Potatoes are hard to grow ?

Wow....easiest thing I ever grew.....plant them in tradditional rows, hill some dirt up over them and weed occassionally during the season. After they flower, you can start digging 'new' potatoes....nice, lightly skinned ones you can wash, boil whole and throw on some butter....ummmmmmmm.... Leave the rest of them until Sept-Oct, well after the tops die off, and you'll have a lot of big potatoes to store thru the winter.

Cut seed potatoes ( either you buy or from your previous crop ) to where they have 1-2 eye ( buds ) for more larger potatoes, or leave 3-4 for more smaller ones ( we split ours and eat the latter as new potatoes in the summer ).

You can also grow them in wire rounds made of 3-4' high field fence wire, filled with just leaves....put a couple feet of leaves in the round, wet, lay your potato cuttings on the leaves, then pile more leaves on that to fill out the round..wet down. In a few months, the whole round will be a mass of green "bush".....to harvest later, open the wire, pull it away and rake back the leaves...which is now closer to leaf compost......and harvest away. Save the broken down leaves for the regular garden.

I used to stop in town in the fall, and pick up all the leaves my truck would hold from people that set them out on the curb.....so much easier than going around raking up my own....those idiots actually do the work FOR YOU, package in a nice bag, then throw them away....ahahahahaaa

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

Good posts/thread everyone.
I hope shovelhead follows your advice.
HEY Andy I'll do you one better... I have the village street maintenace crew deliver me a dumptruck load of bagged leaves. Empty the bags, mow them over. good for mulch and the compost pile... and an extra bonus, you can keep the good bags for your own trash.

Re: Gathering my seed preps
 

The replies posted have not surprised me. You folks share what you know and I could not have asked for more.

77