Baker Creek heirloom seeds

One of the videos by John Kohler mentioned the Baker Creek catalog so I ordered one. He said it would make a good coffee table book. You can also download a free pdf file.  Oh! It just now opened. It's bee-you-tee-full.

The catalog shows lots of kids tickled with the outrageous vegetables they grew.

I bought some seeds from them. Most everything is a little bit weird. Like pink celery (actually purple). Don't these look fun?

Atomic grape tomatoes.

Reisetomate tomato

Nonna Agnes' blue bean

Borlotto Di Vigevano Nano 

Pusa Rudhira red carrot

And many more beautiful oddities. Along with other tried and true heirlooms that are possibly hybrids from previous centuries but not GMO. The thing that you plant is the thing that you'll get.

They also sell live plants. 

I've been thinking about starting plants indoors. 

I already did start dragon fruit seeds and pomegranate seeds but it's been over a week and nothing is happening. 

Then I realized they need heat. And warm as it is in here, it's not warm enough. So I brought out the electric blanket. 

Here's what's so stupid about that electric blanket. I bought it ten years ago to start seeds. And that's all it's ever been used for. But it didn't occur to me to buy the smallest one. It's a queen size, ridiculously oversized. So it's folded in fourths and engulfs the seed packages like a layered clam. And it shuts off every eight hours. It works very well, but a proper heating pad would be better.

And that made me think about starting regular seeds. 

I've had very good luck with that. 

The petunias I started months in advance were better than all the rest that I bought from nurseries.

I started tomatoes in an Earth box. I built a wooden scaffold from thin slats to clamp on lights and move up as they grow. At the time, regular 100W light bulbs. A friend came over while I was making the scaffold and asked me what I was doing. When I told him he laughed like a lunatic. 

He is a laughing lunatic. He laughs in all the wrong places.

How rude!

"Positive thinking," he said.

"F.Y." I said back. 

Perhaps I started a little too early. The vines totally outgrew their scaffolding. I had to extend the whole thing with thin bamboo poles, first for the lights and then for the vines, and they grew beyond those so that I couldn't fit them through the doors to take them outside. I had to cut them in spring to put them outside. Then, although the terrace does not get full sun through the day, only seven hours of straight on sun, they grew like crazy. The lady who swept the parking lot below used to laugh at finding little tomatoes that had fallen.

They were grown from seeds of regular tomatoes that I like from the grocery store. But they were not true to seeds. The results were much smaller than the original hybrid tomatoes. 

Zucchini is a spectacular patio potted plant much like elephant ears. But they leave open space underneath them that can be filled with other shade type plants, so it doesn't look so naked underneath them. The problem is planting too many seeds. You'd want only a few plants or the whole thing gets out of control. 

Did you know that you can buy a bag of dry beans and plant them and they will grow? For a couple of dollars you could have a whole bean farm.

One of the most interesting plants last year was a white eggplant. I made the mistake of planting it in the shade. They grow tall and somewhat conical with large lovely leaves. The eggplants hang inside them. Like a Christmas tree decorated inverted. 

I'm excited already about starting a small garden. We gardener types like to start early.