Seed Saturday

The garden has gotten away from me, and it hasn't even begun yet. Most years the layout is planned and each variety is decided on, but I'm late doing it all this year. I pulled out my seed box and figured out just how many varieties of each plant there is, but there is still the matter of layout. The layout should have been planned and ready by the beginning of April already, but it's just gotten pushed back. Once it's finally planned (I should have it finally figured out in the next few days) I can start seeding some early carrots and/or beets.

The nightly lows are hovering around -3 and -4 for a few days, so all the seedlings had to be brought in from the little greenhouse. It's an unusually cold spurt, with some snow even in the forecast for tomorrow. Normally the snow would be frowned upon, but we desperately need the moisture.

This year I am determined to get some sort of melons growing. More often than not the plants will either grow very well, with zero fruiting, or the plant will look terrible until near the end of the season and then start fruiting like crazy without enough time to ripen. This year I have row covers and many varieties to experiment with. For watermelons there are 3 varieties (Cream of Saskatchewan, Sweet Siberian, and Sugar Baby), and five varieties of cantaloupe (Petite Gris, Minnesota Midget, Tip Top, Gnadenfeld, and Noire Des Carmes), with the hope of one of them producing some sort of decent results.

The pumpkin and squash seeds are quite a mishmash, with over 13 varieties this year. It's hard to say for certain how many different varieties I have because some of the saved seeds were not labelled. Woops. So we'll just say it's 13+.