Next Year’s Garden Starts Now

The sleet is rattling against the window, and the wood stove is popping and making those sounds that tell us a fire is really roaring inside. The dog is snoring on the rug, the snow is supposed to start later in the evening, and schools will likely be out tomorrow. A kettle of vegetable stew made from this past year’s garden produce fills the house with pleasant aromas. The garden itself, with all of its memories of this past year’s bounty, has long been turned under, and the soil is resting under its frozen blanket. Even in the depth of winter, we’re starting next year’s garden right now. At least, that’s what wise gardeners should be doing.

Making Plans for Next Year

One of the best ways for gardeners to survive the cold and darkness of winter is to spend the long evenings by the fire with a pile of mail-order seed catalogs.  With the help of the beautiful photos, we can see in our mind’s eye the rows of beans, the hills of potatoes, and the stalks of corn thrusting up in the sun and warm rain.  The gorgeous seed catalogs and the helpful advice they provide can greatly assist us when we plan next year’s garden. It’s too bad that just like most things in this life, there are limits placed on us when we order garden seed supplies.

If you’re anything like me, it doesn’t take long before dozens of catalog pages have been dog-eared to mark seeds we want to order and plant.  Hundreds of dollars would need to be spent to order all these great looking potential garden plants, but we don’t have unlimited garden space or money. We have to look carefully at what we can order, and then make our purchases accordingly.

How and When to Order Seeds

Timing is everything in many situations, and timing is important when ordering garden seeds.  Kathy McFarland works for Baker Creek Seed Company in Mansfield, Missouri, and she gives some very good advice for gardeners who want to order seeds.

“Most seed catalogs arrive in homes from mid-December into January,” says McFarland, “The Baker Creek Catalog is typically the first one to arrive in homes, usually by the second week of December.  The best time to order is in the dead of winter-January is prime time.  By that time, seed order companies have received their fresh shipments and have the greatest stock.” 

“Ordering earlier in the fall may result in seed houses having several outages due to unreplenished stock,” she continues, “Waiting till late spring to order seeds will often result in disappointment when seed houses are out of certain varieties.”

McFarland recommends a few simple, yet important steps to take for gardeners who want to order.  She advises gardeners to determine what they want and then make a list before contacting the company- write the list out, complete with item numbers and other identifying information and prices. Gardeners should try to avoid fanning through catalog pages when placing a phone order- this almost guarantees items will be lost and not ordered.  All of the major seed companies have online catalogs, and customers can order by phone, online, or mail.

The Burpee Garden Team from the W. Atlee Burpee Company, a seed-order source for many years agrees.  They told me, “The best time of the year for gardeners to start planning their gardens with a seed catalog is as early as January. Most people purchase their indoor seeds in February or early March, but it depends on your climate/growing season.”

Just as a side note to my gardening friends: gardeners who order seeds online or through the mail need to take steps to protect these precious seeds when they arrive.  Seeds must be kept dry.  Any moisture will cause the seeds to rot and fail to germinate. I lost a whole shipment of seeds one season because a tiny bit of condensation water got on my seed packaging and the seeds were ruined.

I keep my early arriving garden seeds in a big metal canister with a tight fitting lid. This protects my future garden from any source of water exposure.

The temperature of the stored seeds is really not too crucial- seeds don’t need to freeze or be exposed to very high temperatures- but room temperature is just fine, and the seeds will be safe until time to plant.

Why Not Just Go to the Big Box Store and Buy What’s There?

Some may think, “Why should I bother with winter ordering of next spring’s seeds?  I’ll just go to the local big box store- they sell garden seeds there. Seeds areseeds, right?”

I have bought vegetable seeds from the local “mart” stores. I did this from necessity- I’d had a planting failure and needed to re-plant and didn’t have time to order from a mail-order delivery seed-seller. Sometimes these “emergency” seeds worked out, but often, they are not as productive as the seeds I originally wanted.

The biggest reason not to rely on the “mart” store for gardening needs is because these stores often sell what they want us to buy, not what we want or need.  Quite often, only a single variety of each kind of vegetable is offered.  Often these varieties are not the best variety for our particular locale - they’re simply what the company wants to sell.  

The Burpee Team says, “Many of the newer seed varieties, and all of the brand new variety introductions for the year are not available in the big box stores. The Burpee.com website and catalog are the only means of purchasing these items.”

This is true of all mail order seed houses.  They all offer new varieties of vegetables each year, and they don’t sell these new and different seeds through retail stores.

A really big advantage of ordering seeds online is that it is a built-in system of keeping track of what varieties have been planted and when they were planted.  This can be a great advantage if your memory, like mine, is prone to lapses.

The Burpee folks tell us that by ordering online, the gardener will have a record of the ordering history.  This enables gardeners to recall information on the exact seed, plant, or garden tool purchase and when it was made. This is very helpful when we want to recall certain varieties we’ve tried and liked in the past and want to grow them again, but have forgotten the variety’s name.

Planting/Growing Zones

One crucial bit of information provided on all seed descriptions in the catalogs is a growing zone chart.  These charts indicate where certain plants grow and when to plant them.

These charts can prove invaluable when trying different kinds of garden plants. That’s one of the best things about a home garden - we can expand the kinds of food we grow and serve. We cannot always assume that what the growing zones tell us is absolutely true- there are many variations in climate and conditions that may make important differences in gardening results. For instance, I started and planted artichokes last year just because I love artichokes and according to the planting zones on the seed catalogs, they should grow in my locale.  Well, my artichokes grew and flourished through the warm spring, but when the season turned to hot, humid, torrential rainy summer, the artichokes died. They just couldn’t take the humidity. Even though the catalog zones told me artichokes would do well here, apparently the artichoke plants didn’t read that information.  So, we gardeners have to wonder if the planting zones in catalogs are any good.  We asked the experts.

The folks from the Burpee Team tell us, “We can’t speak to the accuracy of the growing zones provided by other catalog companies.  However, we can say that we are confident in the gardening zones we provide our customers.  These growing zones were compiled by expert horticulturalists with degrees in horticulture and lots of field experience in the U.S. and even abroad. Plus, Burpee has been successful in giving its customers good garden advice for more than 130 years.

So What Should We Be Doing Now?

The Burpee folks tell us their best advice for “winter gardening.”  They say, “Have a garden plan drafted out before you compile your shopping list.  This will keep gardeners organized and will ensure that they don’t buy too much or too little.  Then, go for it! Growing something new is always a thrill.  If you are not familiar with a new variety, it is best to follow the care and planting instructions on the seed packet.  Once you become familiar with a particular variety, you can experiment with deviating from these instructions based on your own unique growing conditions.”

So even though the snow has drifted across the road and the compost bins out by the garden are just shapeless lumps under the white blanket of winter, with a little planning and anticipation indoors by the fire with our stack of seed catalogs, our gardening season for next year has begun already- in fact, our gardening season never stops.