Planning the Garden 2: The Seed Order

It is an exciting time of year when January comes around, most gardeners have received the catalogs they ordered and are excited to start planning and ordering for this season’s garden.

My process starts by looking at my goals for the year. Then, I use excel to create a list of all the staple crops that I plan on growing, as well as the products I plan on making and storing and the underlying ingredients needed to create these products. See an example of my excel high-level plan below.

Above you can see I have a list of vegetables and fruits that I consume without modification (See column A) Then, as you move to the right you see the types of items that I plan on making and storing, such as salsa and pickles (See Column C). Last, I have a third column that includes the ingredients needed for the items that I plan on making, but the list is reduced by plants or vegetables that I have already listed in the column for staple crops (See Column D).

Another item that I chose to include this year was number of days to maturity (See Columns B and E). This was something I included to high-level start planning for how to optimize my succession planting and the time in between different crops.

After I created my high-level list above, the most arduous task of the seed order needed to occur and that is to take inventory of the seeds I currently have. During this process, I pull all my seed packets out and organize them by type. I start drafting a list of type of seed and amounts of seeds (i.e., full package; half package, etc.).

Once I have taken stock of my current inventory, I comb through the list and get a sense of what I need to order. Then I hunch over all my delightful catalogs, comb through the glorious pictures and descriptions of different seed varieties, and then write a list of what I will order.

This year my order consisted of a few berry plants, potatoes (both sweet, fingerling, and yukon gold), different cucumber varieties, honeydew, sage, basil and many varieties of tomatoes.

Lastly, I place my order with seed providers. A lot of times I rely on using gift cards because when friends and family ask me what I want for Christmas, I say a gift card to one of the seed providers. Then you just await your seeds arrival from USPS or another carrier service.

Look out for to the next installment: succession planting plan.