PDF (Revised 2/26/09)
If you’ve never started a garden from seed, you’re in for a treat … if you do it right.
Here are a handful of links and some useful commentary to help you do it right.
The first thing you need to know (to a reasonable degree of certainty) is the last frost date in your location. While the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) keeps the detailed records, you’ll probably find that this list, at Victory Seeds, works well enough for your needs. I don’t have any financial association with them but, since they had already did the grunt work with the tables from NOAH, why not give them the credit?
Then, when you’ve got that handled, head on over to Little House in the Suburbs for a little calendar / planner to help you use those dates you got from Victory Seeds.
If you don’t already have seed catalogs filling your mail box, surf on over to Jungs Seeds and Plants, Hirts Greenhouse or Totally Tomatoes and either order the seeds and plants directly or at least get your name in the hat for their catalogs. Hirts claims to have the world’s hottest pepper, the Bhut Jolokia.
A few years ago I made the mistake of handling a number of habaneros with bare hands. I will NEVER, EVER repeat that mistake again. At well over 1,000,000 Scoville units, the Bhut Jolokia blows the Habs away. It deserves to be handled with extraordinary care.
In the past, planting a few extremely hot peppers scattered through my garden has seemed to repel a number of bugs. Apparently they know to avoid the aroma and having the hot peppers interspersed with the other plants makes the whole area smell ‘off limits’. I have seen exactly ONE bite taken from a habanero leaf. The Bhut Jolokia is pretty expensive … a show-off plant. But a dozen habaneros (or similar) would not be terribly expensive and could well pay for themselves via produce saved from bugs.
I would encourage you to give extra preference to open-pollinated and heirloom varieties. These do not fall under plant patent protection and will generally breed true … allowing you to save seed from one year to the next. You may need to select for disease or pest resistance if such are not controllable through other means (and they usually are – see the tip about hot peppers above), but the hybrid plants or seeds that you buy will not breed true the following year – if they will sprout at all.
Avoid GMO seeds and plants at all costs. Pandora’s box is being opened by the seed companies in a bid to monopolize all food production everywhere. (When their plants breed with your plants, your seeds end up carrying the patented genes added by their pollen. You, then, are held to have violated their patent on that gene. Is this unfair? ABSOLUTELY. But it is the way the law works.)
If you’ve got a favorite seed or plant vendor and I haven’t mentioned them, why not pass the word via a comment below? When we’ve collected enough to make things interesting (a dozen or so), I’ll create a list as a permanent page.
