Starting with seeds

Sending away for seeds makes me feel more like a real gardener.  For years I have listened to or casually read of the of the more experienced (and successful) vegetable growers who carefully choose their seeds from catalogues, while I continue to pick up mine at Canadian Tire.  Finally, I'm trying it their way, even if only to save the effort of going to Canadian Tire.

My aunt in Cape Breton told me that a fellow in her Gaelic class had mentioned a seed company he favours.   How can you not trust the judgment of someone with the gumption to learn Gaelic?  So I asked her to find out the name of the company and shortly thereafter put in an order to Hope Seeds in Granville Ferry, NS,  for 25 packages of seeds plus a pound of Jerusalem artichoke tubers.  The website - www.hopeseed.com - is easy to navigate and allows online orders.  Descriptions such as "slow to bolt" and "this one survived a hard frost that turned the other varieties black" are very helpful.  The price is more than I used to pay, two to three times as much in most cases, plus shipping and handling.  But let's face it, seeds are cheap, so paying three times as much still isn't that much, especially if they work better.

Some seeds were started last weekend, in the aforementioned fiber pellets:
Early Snowball cauliflower
Marketmore cucumber
Black Seeded Simpson lettuce
Jericho lettuce
King of the North sweet pepper
Costata Romanesca zucchini
Red Kuri winter squash
Tigerella tomato
Longkeeper tomato
San Marzano tomato
Borage
Black Cumin (Nigella)
Santo coriander
Sage
English thyme
Minnesota Midget musk melon
Blacktail Mountain watermelon
Ring o' Fire pepper
Tribe's Tobique tomato

Lettuce, thyme, cauliflower, zucchini, cucumber and borage are all awake and now I have to think about how to keep them happy until it's safe to put them in the ground.  Lettuce, thyme and cauliflower can suffer the slings and arrows of a southern Alberta April.  Zucchini and cucumber will have to be coddled indoors for a while and then in the greenhouse until the end of May.

It's too soon to give a full endorsement of Hope Seeds; that has to wait until we've tasted the fruits of this year's experiment (it's always a bit of an experiment).  So far, so good.