provide good growing conditions for the plants.

Dont stint on fertilizers, but try substituting manure tea for the heavy feeder in place of the more expensive fish emulsion fertilizer. Remember that the extra electricity used to run your fluorescent lights should be figured into the costs of doing business. Youll want to keep good records of expenses and income, obviously, so that you can tell whether your seedling business costs or pays. Naturally, expenses in setting up will keep the ledger red for the first few months. Its unlikely youll get rich at this, but often a little extra effort and space, spent at something you enjoy doing anyway, will help to pay for some household necessities.

35 The Garden Diary

I keep your running record of our gardening activities and results, partly, I guess, because Im a compulsive note-taker, but mostly for curiosity, comparison, planning, and improvement. The record is a useful tool that helps me, each year, to avoid at least some of the mistakes of yeas gone by. Garden notes need not be elaborate or even terribly well organized, as long as you can find them. My own system smacks of the patchwork theme that has become the trademark of our homestead. The heart of the system is a calendar that has space for notions on each day of the month. This is where I record planting dates, both indoors and outdoors, dates of the first harvest, peak harvest times for different vegetables, yields, weather and insect problems (excuses, excuses), notes to remind myself to save seeds of certain vegetables, the phone number of the man who shells peas by the bushel (we gardeners always were an optimistic lot), and kinds and amounts of manure and rock minerals and when and where they were spread. The calendars differ from year to year, but they follow a basic pattern. Notations during the dead of winter center around ordering seeds and planting seed flats. Spring notes proclaim, Ate first spring onion tops today! peepers back, planted out head lettuce, hard freeze at night (April 22). By June the page is scrawled up and running into the margins: make smaller, more frequent leaf lettuce plantings next year, mammoth melting sugar peas better than dwarf kinds, first zucchini today (June 19). Late summer and fall are crowed with pickling, canning, and freezing tallies, as well as references to prime foraging dates, mushrooms, and nuts to watch for,

up to and well beyond the day when black frost ... 25 degrees last night proclaims the certain turning of the seasons. Interspersed with my garden notes, of course, are records of other homestead happenings with goats, bees, hens, sheep, hay, and wildlife, as well as odd tidbits that just should not go unrecorded: toad returned to the barn today, found bottle gentians near swamp, bluebirds nesting, geese going south, nine fall ducklings hatched by Crazy Lucy. If we have an extra load of manure and decide to divide it between the corn patch and the grapes, I make note that fact because I know Ill forget by the next barn-cleaning time which piece of ground got the bonus. Comparing harvest times from year to year help me to determine how far back I can push certain planting dates in spring and which varieties work best with this kind of gamble. Yield notes influence the amounts and kinds of vegetables Ill grow next year. Notations of food quantities put into storage, averaged over five to ten years, tell me in a general way how much is enough. Since food quality and nutritional value are highest during the first year in storage, I prefer to can and freeze for one year only. Two other record sheets figure in my yearly planning guide. One is the garden diagram, that much-revised, out-of-scale sketch of the garden rows and what they grew, including intercropping tricks that worked, succession plantings, and last-minute replacements of row or plant wipeouts. (Who are the early beets?) Ill never know. Whoever it was never made it back to gobble the chamomile and basil I put in their place, though). The other list I keep from year to year is the sheet of scrap paper on which I record kinds and amounts of seeds under the name of the company from which I ordered them. This saves time when ordering next year. Des Vertus Marteau Turnip, for example, is one of my favorites, but only two seed companies carry it. Or I may want to try a different strain of butternut squash from a new seed house or a taller snapdragon variety. Experiments in plant breeding, seed saving, insect control, and the like will be of lasting value only if recorded: what did you do, when, to what, how long did it take, and what were the results? Taking notes on the garden gets to be a habit. Keeping the calendar handy, with a pencil nearby, ensures that its not a chore, and referring to the notes of other years helps me to determine where to start and how to proceed this year. More kale, more leeks, less broccoli, reads my command to myself. If I ignore it this year, Ill have to record it in red next year. And so the years cycle into one another, each one different, yet grounded in the year before. To leave them unrecorded is to miss much valuable information and many important memories.

36 Seed Catalogs
Recently I read an article by a man who maintained hed received an excellent education by observing and asking questions in his local hardware store. I couldnt agree more; Mike and I have also learned a lot this way. I feel the same about seed catalogs. In between the vegetable descriptions is helpful information on planting, insect control, harvesting, and even cooking. As you look for varieties of vegetables that will be most suitable for your garden, youll learn, too, to evaluate the offerings of the different seed firms. Disease resistance, for example, is important, especially with cucumbers and tomatoes, if you have had previous disease problems in

your patch. You must know what your problem was so that you can choose a variety with specific resistance. Even then, resistance doesnt guarantee immunity, and a pea that is resistant, say, to fusarium wilt may still come down with downy mildew, or a scab-resistant cucumber may succumb to anthracnose or mosaic. Generally, a resistant strain is less vulnerable varieties will increase considerably in the near future. When shopping for early-producing vegetables, check out the catalog claims for flavor. Some early vegetables have fine flavor, but in others taste is sacrificed to a certain extent for quick harvest. Here again, early varieties are being improved, and youll find more and more that they taste, as well as look, good. Should you buy pelleted seeds? I did. Once. The bentonite clay often used to coat fine seeds is sometimes slow to admit water. The pelleted carrot seeds I planted as an experiment cost more and produced less than a comparable number of regular seeds. If your garden area is small, look for bush varieties of some of the cucurbit space-grabbers like corn squash and even pumpkins. Flavor is not always quite up to that of the vining crops, but should still compete with anything you could buy. If youve been bitten by the gardening bug half as badly as I have, Im sure youll need to urging to try one or two or three new plants each year. Not very experiment will earn a permanent place on your garden plant, but youre sure to find at least a few vegetables and flowers that youll wonder how you ever did without. Even if its just a new variety of tomato, one of the high crimson (extra red) ones perhaps, or the Sweet 100 that bears so generously that it must be staked, treat yourself to something new. Even at todays prices, a packet of seeds is one of the very best buys you can make. Vegetables and flowers designated as All-America selections have been chosen for their high quality and ability to grow well in different parts of the country. The All-America selection trials have been set up as a nonprofit institution, managed by cooperating seed companies. Member firms, as long as they offer seeds obtained solely from the original grower - none of their own - for the first three seeds. This eliminates a lot of the secretive hocus-pocus that formerly attended the introduction of new varieties. The effect is to protect the company offering a good new type of seed, to make it worth their while to share it, and to put good new strains in the hands of home gardeners sooner. Catalogs differ, too. Some are general, others specialize in northern-grown or openpollinated seeds, in herbs or cantaloupes, in cutting flowers, or in extra-large vegetables. I dont believe Ive ever yet sent for a seed catalog that didnt have some different offering I found tempting. Adding to your catalog library might make your January fireside planning a bit more complicated, but Ill bet your June garden will be a lot tastier. Youll often hear that you should buy seeds from a firm based in a climate similar to yours, or at least as cold in winter, in order to get plants that are acclimated to your regional conditions. Thats good advice, as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that these days most large seed companies buy seeds on contract from large-scale growers. Some seedsmen, however, do raise most of their own seeds, and indicate this in their catalogs. Seeds that Ive purchased from Main, Vermont, New Jersey, California,, Canada, England, Maryland, Iowa, North Dakota, and other states have performed well here in my Pennsylvania garden, leading me to conclude that, in this latitude at least, the geographical location of the seed source is not critical. It may be more important for cold-climate gardeners or for those in the Deep South. One more thing. Keep those catalogs around after youve sent out your order. With the exception of Stokes, whose seed packets are an education in themselves, planting information is

usually more completely spelled out in the catalog than on the seed envelope, so you might want to refer to the catalog again at planting time. In the back of this book, in alphabetical order, is a list of companies selling mail- order seeds. Unless otherwise noted, catalogs are free.

37 Seed Exchanges
Think of all the mountain hollows, city plots, small-town homesteads, and isolated ranches where people may be saving seeds of an heirloom bean or a special meaty tomato or a slowbolting lettuce. Simply keeping these varieties alive and occasionally improving on them is a good thing. Perhaps the seeds are passed around the family or the neighborhood, but often the strain remains in a relatively restricted pocket, going round and round each year, but not spreading. If the seeds are not replanted regularly, in fact, or if they are lost, the strain will die out and can never be recaptured. Suppose, though, that some way was found to bring some of these people together, to let them know about each other and the seeds they save, to make it easy, foe example, for a gardener in Iowa to try seeds raised in a Georgia garden, and to facilitate the sharing of seeds that might otherwise peter out with people who care about such things. Just imagine all the possibilities that would be generated by such a network! Now for the really good news: the network exists. Gardeners who save their own nonhybrid seeds now have the opportunity to trade seeds with other gardeners through membership in a seed exchange. These exchanges, which started quite recently as one-man, grass-roots ventures, are growing in size and scope. Their potential for good is tremendous.

The Seed Savers Exchange

How does a seed exchange work? Lets take a look at the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), originated by Kent Whealy. This exchange was designed to be a communications network for serious gardeners devoted to spreading as many good, nonhybrid, and especially old, rare, or highly localized vegetable varieties to as many gardens as possible, before these seeds are lost. Whealy started the SSE as a simple newsletter. He was prompted by the death of his wifes grandfather, who has given him tomato, bean, and morning-glory seeds that had been kept alive by four generations of his family. Whealy realized that it was now up to him to keep those seeds alive, nd he began to wonder how many other good old vegetable varieties had already died out with the elderly gardeners who had been keeping them. The grass-roots exchange that numbered 29 members in 1975 has now grown to a seed preservation effort that is international in scope, with hundreds of members and tax exempt status. Its publications retain the homey flavor of the early back-fence exchanges, but they also crackle with the excitement of networking on the leading edge of a vital effort to safeguard our rich genetic heritage, just before its too late. The SSE is one of the most hopeful forces for good in home gardening today, and I recommend it to all concerned gardeners as an example of effective positive action. The SSE runs an annual camp-out a gathering of members and others with an interest in seed saving and the preservation of genetic diversity. It also has published two books: the garden seed inventory, a listing of almost 6,000 nonhybrid garden seeds and their sources ($12.50 postpaid) and Seed Savers Exchange: the first ten year, a collection of useful articles from