At last, the inventory of seeds I’ve got stored is complete, and I’ve learned a few things about myself in the process.

1 – I have a shocking fetish for beans! I don’t think I always have, but the success of all sort of legumes in my garden last year must have boosted my confidence in and love for beans to a ridiculous degree. I did pick snap peas for two months in spring and I did have bumper crops of multiple string bean varieties all summer. I invited friends and neighbors to come glean in August. When the frost came, there were probably still 5 5-gallon buckets left on the vines. I picked and ate so many beans, you think I’d swear off them for a year or so. But no! Apparently in a fit of enthusiasm during the middle of the season last year I re-stocked my bean supply from Johnny’s Seed and then this Christmas I placed a $100-plus order with Vermont Bean Seed Company. Oddly enough, there was no duplication in the orders, even though I forgot about the Johnny’s order when I made the Vermont one. I expanded my supply to include Limas, Butterbeans and multiple varieties of dried beans for this year – so hopefully the good run will continue and I won’t see any Mexican Bean Beetles.

Many of the varieties are new to me, so I’m thankful that both Johnny’s and Vermont Bean have thorough growing instructions printed directly on their packets. Cultural information on packets is, for me, something that is worth paying extra money for, and though these companies aren’t bargain houses, I’m more than happy to spend more on seed if it means I don’t have to haul my hard-cover planting manuals or flimsy paper catalogs out to the fields when I’m sowing. Plus, I can hand the packets to the various volunteers and Work Share Farm Members who help run the gardens here and trust that they can plant them correctly whether they’ve got lots of experience under their belts or not. As long as they follow the directions right there on the packet for depth and spacing, we’ll have food!

Before the growing season, I do skim through all of my seed-starting books, and I re-read the catalogs I ordered from, since most have lots of wonderful growing information, but there is no way I’m going to recall those details when I get out in the dirt. And even if I did, the chances of accurately communicating them to each and every busy worker on a planting day are slim. I had some crazily dense rows of carrots last year that were the result of hastily-given instructions to a new gardener, and thinning the miniature forest for an hour bent on my hands and knees was the penance I paid a few weeks later.

Irresistable!

2 – I also have a serious thing for radishes. Honestly, I don’t know what gardener can resist them. The cheerfully colored globes are one of the first nibbles you can take out of the garden in chilly spring. They’ll happily grow in dappled sun at the edge of your garden in summer and even do pretty well hidden under the leaves of larger crops in the late season. And taste! Radishes offer everything from sweet to spicy to mustard-y. The roots are ready to eat at pretty much any time in their growth cycle, and if they get too big and woody for your palate, you can let them grow on to develop seed in the form of spicy pods that can be harvested and thrown into salad or stirfry. The Chinese Daikon or large-root radish can culminate in a pungent 20-pound root that is most commonly grated and cooked, rather than eaten fresh, but the baby plants can be harvested as mild micro-greens to garnish salads and soups. What a beautiful, forgiving and rewarding vegetable!

As proof of my devotion, I’ve got packets of more varieties than some catalogs sell. From the Chinese Winter White, which grows 8” inches long and will hold through frost, to a darling Easter Egg mix that will produce perfect pink, white, fuschia and purple bon-bons in three weeks. I’ve also got the classy long French Breakfast, several German Beer radishes and the fabulous and strange Spanish Black that grows three inches across and is yummy with dip. Then there’s White Hailstone, Red Meat, Watermelon, Scarlet Globe and Chinese Rose. I guess I don’t need to order more at this time. But I might anyway.

3 – I’m not a fast learner. I’ve never grown a satisfactory crop of sweet corn on this farm, and every year I swear I’ll give up trying, yet I find that I keep buying the seed. Here in the stash I find several pounds of sweet corn and some smaller packets of popcorn and Incan parching corn. On a market farm the size of ours, with just over one acre in intensive cultivation and the rest of our 10 useable acres beholden to animals for pasture, a crop like corn just doesn’t make sense. Corn, really just an out-sized grass, takes up a lot of room – with plants spaced 6 inches apart and rows 3 feet apart. Then the stalks grow to monstrous heights, sucking up vast amounts of nutrients from the soil, to produce an average of 3 ears per plant. That’s in the best of years. In other years, drought leaves the plants stunted, flood makes the roots soggy and susceptible to disease or, as happened last year to us, a 15-minute windstorm knocked over half the mature stalks right to the ground. Then there are the bugs. And the raccoons. Deer. As if that weren’t enough strikes against this crop, there is also the issue of pollination. For sweet corn to turn out sweet and not starchy or off-flavored, the plants must be planted in a block next to each other, but at least 25 feet away from another variety so that the silken hairs on the baby ears are only pollinated by their own variety of powdery tassels. Each appropriately-pollinated hair will produce a kernel true to the variety that was planted. When acres of corn are involved, the recommendation is 200 feet apart. Here, our tiny farm is surrounded by oceans of GMO feed corn on every side.

Nevertheless, I’ve got the seed to plant. I’ll find the room somehow. And maybe this will be the year I succeed! Isn’t that the perennial rally of every gardener? To plant is to risk, so what the heck. This year, the closest of my neighboring fields is scheduled for soybean rotation instead of corn, so we may have a fighting chance.

4 – I also learned that I didn’t have quite as much in the stash as I imagined. Which is a good thing, mostly. The vast majority of seeds are quite viable for many years, actually, with many reliably germinating 5 years after harvest. I spotted some seed packets this year that I know I planted from in Chicago before we moved out here. But while it’s nice to know that you have some areas of your garden covered already, it sure is entertaining this time of year to have an excuse to browse in and shop from seed catalogs. I find that I’ve got a lot of a few things – like beans, brassicas, radishes, corn and greens. Yet I’m quite low on tomatoes and peppers, which is pretty surprising since these plants are like the pantry staples of the gardeners’ seed stash. We rarely have to buy them, though it’s hard to resist adding a new variety or two each season. Most of us have a ton of tomato and pepper seeds carried over from year to year because even in a garden my size you’ll only grow a dozen at most of each variety, and the packets come with hundreds of seeds. But this year I have only two opened packets of each, so I get to splurge on old favorites as well as new varieties. Time to bust out the catalogs!

Mmmmm, heirloom temptation!