Gardeners' Holidays 2024: The Changing of the Garden

Happy solstice, everyone! Or just past the solstice, at any rate. I'm a little late posting this week because we spent all day in the car yesterday, driving out to Indiana to spend Christmas with Brian's family. As per our usual practice, we spent part of that trip selecting seeds for next year's garden—and, in a surprise turn of events, the catalog we chose them from was our former favorite, Fedco Seeds. 

You may recall that we decided to break with Fedco in 2022 because it had become increasingly unreliable, sending us some seeds that were duds and others that weren't what we'd ordered. In 2023 we tried Botanical Interests. It introduced us to some new varieties we really liked, particularly Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce, which lived up to its name by being very productive throughout the whole growing season. But Botanical Interests didn't have the Carmen peppers we've come to rely on, so in 2024 we switched to True Leaf Market. It, too, proved less than satisfactory. Several of the seed varieties it sent us were unimpressive; some were clearly not what we'd ordered; and one, the Thai basil, had literally no flavor whatsoever. 

At this point, Brian suggested that maybe, rather than trying yet a third new supplier, we should just go back to Fedco. Yes, it wasn't 100 percent reliable, but neither were the others we'd tried, and it was cheaper and had most of our favorite varieties. So that's how we ended up sitting in the car yesterday, picking out the following crops:

• Arugula. The "slow bolt" arugula we bought from True Leaf this year was pretty patchy, so we're replacing it with a variety called Ice-Bred. Fedco bills it as "one tough cookie": quick to mature, yet slow to bolt, and capable of surviving under the snow all winter to yield a fresh crop in spring.
• Thai basil. After last year's disappointment with True Leaf's "holy basil," we steered clear of the so-called "sacred basil" and went with Flowering Thai Basil. It promises "voluminous," bushy plants with both strong flavor and ample production.
• Cucumbers. We had a particularly bad year for cucumbers. The Boston Pickling cucumbers we got from True Leaf yielded only one medium-sized cuke, and our usually trusty Marketmores never came up at all. (We bought some Straight Eight plants to replace them, but they only produced five itty-bitty cukes.) We're going to give the Boston Pickling variety one more try, but as a hedge, we're also getting some of Fedco's South Wind variety, a slicing cucumber with "strong vigorous productive plants" highly resistant to powdery mildew.
  
• Green beans. We're replenishing our supply of our favorite Provider variety. As per the name, it generally produces well except when the young plants get chomped, so we'll have to make it a priority to protect them somehow. Possibly a job for the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder.
• Lettuce. Sadly, Fedco does not have the Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce (also known by its French name, Merveille des Quatre Saisons) that we've become so attached to in the past two years. But it does have a variety called Pirat that it says is "Descended from Merveille des Quatre Saisons and is much more bolt resistant." So we'll take a flier at that and see if it's as good as its ancestor. If it is, we'll probably ditch our summer lettuce blend altogether and grow this variety year-round.
• Peppers. We're restocking our trusty Carmen peppers and also trying a new variety, Aconcagua. It supposedly produces huge plants (up to 3 feet) with huge fruits (up to 10 inches) that are "very sweet, crunchy and fruity."
• Scallions. The Flagpole variety we tried from True Leaf was another disappointment, so we're going back to Evergreen Bunching White, which has served us well in the past.
• Snap peas. Next to the Thai basil, the supposed Cascadia snap peas we ordered from True Leaf were the biggest disappointment. The variety it sent us was clearly not Cascadia, nor any other snap pea; it was a snow pea that's meant to be eaten while it's small and tender. Unfortunately, we didn't realize this, so we let the peas grow to full size, at which point they were tough and near-inedible. We're hoping the Cascadia peas we get from Fedco next year will be the real thing.
• Tomatoes. We're restocking our trusty Premio and Sun Gold tomatoes, which always work for us. We have enough of our other two favorites, Pineapple and San Marzano, to get us through this season, but next year we'll need to find another source for the San Marzano, which Fedco doesn't have.

So that's next year's seed order sorted. We've already taken care of our other winter gardening tasks: draining the rain barrel and covering the garden paths with a thick layer of leaves, most of them swiped from off the curb in front of our neighbor's house. (I felt a bit bad about this, but as Brian pointed out, our neighbor didn't want them, and the borough, which was going to pick them up, was probably providing that service only to keep them from piling up in the street.) So our garden is now well settled in for its long winter's nap. All we have to do now is place our seed order and snuggle in ourselves until seed-starting season rolls around.