Buying seeds for spring planting

As I pointed out in November, my business partner is putting about 5 acres under intense cultivation in marketable vegetables, so I really won't need to buy any vegetable seed for my family's own garden, which leaves me free to plant some unusual things. This year I will have a chance to start gardening the way I want for the future.

My survival garden is geared very much toward easily stored foods, grains such as buckwheat, amaranth, alfalfa, barley, hard red winter wheat, quinoa and millet, and beans that can be dried and put up in bags or old wine bottles, usually called "shell beans," such as pintos, kidneys, cowpeas (blackeyed peas), some limas, etc. I want to grow as many different types of these shell beans as possible, to provide both visual and taste variety.

This grain/bean combination has the advantages of providing large quantities of whole proteins, and they can also be made into porridges for breakfast and stews for dinners. They can be served cold and mixed with honey, or hot and served with corn pones. They can be ground for bread. They can also be sprouted to increase their vitamin content.

Leftovers can be eaten cold, or made into patties and fried into cakes.

Most of them are also highly bee-friendly, and I look forward to a bumper honey crop.

And they store well, and can be easily measured out and put in any other container for trading purposes. Try that with canned squash.

Beans and grains also have much better soil-building capacity than, say, tomatoes or broccoli.

They can provide winter food for chickens, goats and rabbits (my next food resource acquisitions, God please grant me the time!), and bait for deer.

Perhaps most importantly, these foods produce meals that my family and friends will eat and can digest. Most of us around my neck of the woods have been raised on "soup beans and cornbread" and won't mind at all having to eat it (for a while at least).

To have farm-fresh canned veggies all winter long would be nice, but canning is expensive both in resources (imagine cutting enough wood in the middle of the summer to heat pressure cookers for canning bushel after bushel of green beans) and time. Grains and beans just need separating from shells and threshing, and then drying.

I also intend to buy some other new things to grow, like sweet clover, and possibly a couple of pecan and persimmon trees. And some other marketables that may have an economic niche someday, like cotton and tobacco.

My purchases for now also include many herbs which will be new to my garden, chosen both for medicinal and cooking use, and picked largely by my skeptical, yet loving, wife.

Below is the first column of a spreadsheet I am using to compare costs from different seed sellers:


Crop (grains)
Buckwheat
Millet
Yellow sweet clover
Alfalfa
Russian sunflower
Flax
Barley
Sorghum
Crop (legumes)
shell beans:
Etna
Black Turtle
Hidatsu Shield Figure
Yin Yang
Kidney
Pinto
Crop (herbs)
Rosemary
Basil
St. John's Wort
Chamomile
Catnip
Lemon Balm
Yarrow

Yes, I know clove isn't a grain, but it seems to be best purchased from the same places that sell grains.

I think 2010 is going to be a very bad year economically for a lot of people, including me and my family. It is going to be more important than ever before for us all to find cheaper ways to do the simple things, including putting dinner on the table. If you don't have a garden yet, please give some serious thought to starting one.

The people you love most may thank you one day.

Pray for Israel,
Gallowglass