Seeding this year's garden

Although I am not a particular fan of New Year's celebrations, I do enjoy the new year. January in Lexington is when the cold really sets in and my nighttime walks get magnificently quiet: no bugs, less auto traffic, fewer pedestrians. Perhaps because January is when winter starts to take hold that it is also when I begin to peruse the seed catalogs and actively start working my imagination toward the coming year's garden.

For the past two years I have retreated to a small room built into a corner of our unfinished basement to choose my seeds and plot my immaculate (and never realized) spring and summer gardens. The room is essentially a 6'x10' area, framed in to separate it from the rest of the open basement (presumably as a grow room at some point in time). Just over half the square footage is taken up by a four foot high concrete ledge, painted white here inside the room, which runs the entire length of the two back corner walls and leaves room for about 2-3 people to comfortably stand.

The place has become my garden headquarters. The concrete ledge that brackets the inside of the room is wide enough to hold comfortably two seed trays twice over and still leave me enough space on it to lay out books and seed catalogs, write in my journal, draw sketches of hare-brained ideas, collect stacks of pilfered Cricket Press, Holler and other art posters (to later decorate the room), lay down half-drunk bottles of wine, and store a bunch of old seeds for the next year's garden. The place is my winter and spring refuge.

In what is beginning to resemble a seasonal habit, I began my return to my garden headquarters in December by locating and corralling all my packets of seed, which I had gathered at different times during last year's chaotic fall growing season and placed at different points throughout the house and my truck, and moving them downstairs. December's chore finished, in the new year last week I began to sort and catalog bits of data in my log book. As the temperature dropped into the teens at several points during the past week, I sat in the basement, beneath the dirt and under some fluorescent light, and started preparing this year's gardens.

I began with the seeds.

A look at my log book after cataloging both “field seed” (what I saved from last year's harvest) and “packet seed” (seed from last year's purchased seeds) shows that I was more more diligent about saving seed this past year. That seems hardly possible—I'm a lazy gardener, almost as a matter of principal—but the log book doesn't lie: 4 different varieties each of tomatoes and peppers, three each of beans and winter squash, and two types of watermelon. Not good, but better, and with names like big red and med pink (tomatoes), watermelon I and watermelon II (watermelons), and green, soup and bean 3 (beans), I've still got the lazy covered.

Combined with last year's packet seed, all told I've got basil, beans, summer and winter squash, eggplant, watermelon, peppers, greens, a variety of herbs, and a ridiculous 15 varieties of heirloom tomatoes that I can begin under lights in late February. (My log book tells me that last year my first batch of seeds were started February 28; I'll try a batch of peppers a little bit earlier this year.)

Subsequent nights I have spent perusing the seed catalogs, which began arriving to my door in mid-December. I normally begin by choosing a couple catalogs and circling anything that I might plausibly want. When I'm done looking through all these, I make a list of everything circled and then compare it with my own catalog of seed.

I'm pretty exuberant, so I try and make a seed budget (how much do I want to spend on seed this year?). This helps me pare down costs but also allows me to sample new seed by buying from the catalogs. This year, I'm focusing mainly on different varieties of greens, carrots, okra, cucumbers and sunflowers (4 varieties as a border for a natural labyrinth a friend grew into some uncut grass). In my early, teen-charged seed-spreading days, I spent close to $150; I'm now down to around $50, a number that does not include potatoes. (Ronniger's Potato catalog has yet to arrive, but in conjunction with some friends I will be getting boatloads of their purple and yellow and red fingerlings.)

This number is way higher than most backyard gardeners; I happen to have access to a number of outlets for my seed. I am fortunate in that, along with four friends, I rent a 12 acre place 13 miles away in Keene, KY. We have developed over several years three or so gardens where we grow potatoes, corn, winter squash, watermelons, and other things that do not require constant harvest. In addition, off Leestown Road I have developed a sizeable (for the lazy amateur gardener, anyway) plot of land at Bluegrass Community and Technical College's PeaceMeal Gardens. This produce feeds into my Free Store, which runs into the late spring and summer months when my teaching schedule relaxes considerably. (This garden will receive most of the okra and greens, two products in high demand last year.) And finally, I normally grow tomato plants from last year's seeds and give them away to any of my 5 classes of students who desire them.

Combined with my backyard garden, these side-interests make for a considerably larger seed footprint than most non-professionals. But the basics are still there: start checking out seed catalogs now. If they treat you like they treat me, even in the dead of winter—and perhaps because of the dead of winter—the catalogs will inspire the living shit out of you. They'll make you hungry, sure enough.