Here comes the Snow and Garden ramblings

 

We have Snow in the forecast

Saturday Dec 18th 4-8" last I heard.  Hah, I just saw the Accuweather map this morning showing 6-12".  This'll be plowable for sure, the first this year for us. 

Deer - Rose was so happy that she tapped on the kitchen door window the other night to get my attention and after hurriedly pushing the dogs back I was able to squeeze through the door keeping them in.  They can't get to the deer but will bard to scare them away.  Rose turned on the flashlight, and low and behold 6-9+ deer all jostling for a spot in the deer-yard,  the deer-yard is a lollipop circle mid field where we feed the deer in the Spring through Summer months, in Winter, we feed the herd closer to the house as we have to snow blow path out there. 

Garden and seed thoughts - I found myself thinking about our 2022 garden already and whining to myself about the price of seeds, then I remembered complaining loudly to Rose about the price of plants too...   lol, I found that funny, seeds are cheap by comparison.  

Much of what we grow in our expanding gardens are heirlooms, a lot of what we grow are heirloom non-hybridized varieties so that seeds we save from them will come back true to the original as long as we're careful with cross-pollination! An heirloom is anything of value (though not necessarily economic) to a person, family or group passed down from one generation to other.  We weren't so careful about cross-pollination one year and one of our squash plants crossed with something awful, we had the bitterest squash I've ever tasted that year.  We taste everything we put up now, every time!  It's a bummer when you raise a plant, keep the bugs and critters from eating it, have it fruit, pick, process it and can or freeze it to then cook and taste something bitter.

At Victory Seeds a Cherokee Purple Tomato Seed packet is $2.95/pkt. and Each packet contains approximately 20 seeds.

Burpee has one variety of San Marzano paste tomato 6.95/Pkt.  and 150 seeds per pkt. (A much larger fruit than an Amish paste tomato)

We pay as much as $4.00 per heirloom plant for a rare heirloom Tomato plant, yes that's for one plant, at a local greenhouse that specializes in some great Heirloom varieties! You can't grow them all, can you?  I try to sneak in as many tomatoes as possible into the garden, Rose keeps me in check. We try a few that we haven't tried every year as well as out fav's, we scaled back a bit this year...

Seed prices are just fine!

We lost most of our Tomato seedlings we grew in the house last year, lord knows what took them out, it was sad.