My Territorial Seed Catalog Came Over the Weekend

My Territorial Seed Catalog come this weekend.  So now, in addition to trying to make up my mind which bushes to plant, I have to make up my mind which vegetables to plant.  I have to admit, I get a lot more excited about planting fruit trees and bushes than vegetables. 

There are a lot of good seed companies out there, but I like to buy from Territorial because they test all their seeds right here in Oregon.  So I know they offer varieties that will do well in the Pacific Northwest.

I always plant their London Springs lettuce mix.  I never let the lettuce grow into heads, I just pick off leaves as I need them.  The London Springs mix has lots of loose-leaf lettuces anyway, so this is OK.  And it seems to work well with the butterhead varieties that are also in the mix.

I also always plant a variety of snap peas and some pole beans.  I get snap peas because I'm too lazy to shell regular peas.  And besides, I like them.  And fresh green beans are so much better than canned or frozen that I have to grow them too.

I also like to grow kale.  Territorial has a Wild Garden Kales mix that I like.  I snip off individual leaves when they're young and mix them in my salads.  Sometimes I'll snip off some kale and mix it in with soup or scrambled eggs.  Or whatever strikes my fancy.

Last year I grew green onions for the first time, and I think I'll do that again this year.  I like green onions in my salad, and they were really easy to grow.

And I'll try to grow beets again this year.  I've never been able to get good beet roots.  The greens grow fine, but not the roots.  So I think I have too much nitrogen in the fertilizer and not enough phosphorous.  So I'll try to tweak my fertilizer.

I'll try cantaloupe and pumpkins again this year.  I've tried them the last couple years, and I've messed them up.  I've procrastinated too long and gotten them in the ground too late to get good fruit from them.  This year I'll do better.  Really!

Ooh, ooh, and I'll try Aunt Molly's Ground Cherries again.  I tried them last year, but procrastinated too long with them, too.  They grow, and produced fruit, but nothing had time to ripen.  So this year I'll get them in earlier and they'll do well.  I've heard so much about ground cherries that I really want to try them.

I want to try Snackjack Pumpkins this year.  They have hull-less seeds, so I really want to give them a try.  But Territorial doesn't offer them any longer.  However, I got a catalog from the Vermont Bean Company, and they do offer them.  So I think I'll get seeds from them and see how the Snackjacks grow.

Oh, and potatoes.  I liked my experiment with them last year, so I'll grow them again this year.  We're supposed to be able to overwinter our potatoes in the ground here, so I tried to do that with my fingerling spuds.  But then we had a week of never-before-in-my-life cold weather and the ground froze much deeper than normal.  The spuds I've found so far have been mushy.  There may be some deeper that are still good, but the ground a couple inches deep is still frozen so I don't know what's beneath that.  I'll probably have to get new seed potatoes this year.  Oh well.  They were easy to grow, and nice looking plants.

That ought to be enough veggies for this non-vegetable grower.