The vegetable garden seed catalog arrives in your mailbox.
Thinking spring planting and what goes where in the rich fertile garden soil at your home? Anyone who plants a vegetable, fruit or flower garden in Maine knows the joy of beginning again. Plop down on your knees working the dirt, preparing it for the rows of seeds or transplants. Half the fun of a garden is knowing where what you eat came from and what it was not sprayed with at meal time.
Giving away the extra bounty of the backyard or side lot vegetable garden seed catalog in Maine is pleasurable too.
Older friends and neighbors around you enjoy those beef stake Earthy tasty tomatoes. Nothing hot house or shipped in from who knows where and gassed with substances to enhance the look. It seems the appearance is more important to the taste for many.
Lots of people just don’t know what a tomato fresh out of your garden tastes like sliced, diced, raw.
Sadly, many think cooking involves a microwave with a minute timer and revolving glass plate inside. Good food takes patience. Beginning with the buying your catalog garden seeds, raising the food from scratch and weeks, months of tending for the bounty.
Stirring the slowly simmering large pot on the kitchen stove as cut onions, peppers, mushrooms from your vegetable garden slide into the home made mixture.
That food preparation with nothing from the grocery store fills your house with the smell of home cooked, not store bought. Reminding you of family members who taught everyone the tried and tested recipes to pass down to the next generation.
The catalogs for garden seeds, you don’t have to wait until they all arrive by the postal service.
Internet connections mean head to the cyber store or many Mainers buy their peat pots early. Getting their seeds and onion bulbs from the local grain and feed store. Many a Maine home have glass sun porches turned into garden nurseries. Getting the jump on the growing season inside out of the wind and colder temperatures. Before being planted in the garden that may still be frozen or drying out, warming up to prepare for the new crop. Vegetable garden seed catalog, are they rolling into your mailbox?
Laying out the grid work of what goes where and why.
Often what is in this section of the garden is early harvest and makes way for the later, longer growing season plants to move into the vacated space. Out in the morning sunshine, celebrating spring and saying good riddance to the passing of old man winter. Beginning again, starting fresh and anew. The older you get, the faster the Earth spins and the seasons change. Have you noticed that?
In rural Maine, what not to plant does not just include just watermelon or other fruit better suited for southern climate gardens.
There is so much Maine farm field food free for the gleaning without even asking if you block out an hour or two. To visit a fall harvest farm field to pick the potatoes of all sizes left behind in the mad dash of a mechanized harvester. Those harvesters don’t do as good a job as the hand picking crews that taught kids work ethic and put some jingle in their pockets.
Growing something and peddling it in an open air farmers market in Maine is a great childhood experience.
But gleaning field tip number one for Maine farm fields.
Shortly after the field crew leaves the field, move in. Don’t wait. Because if you do the exposed potatoes will turn green from the overhead afternoon hot sun. Or the dip in temperatures tonight to below freezing will damage the produce. Not allowing it to last as long in your basement root cellar.
On a Maine farm I own, gleaning for perfectly good potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, squash and red, golden beets is encouraged.
And free for the asking because it is a shame that a third of the food produced in this World is wasted, never served up and dished out onto meal time plates. In Maine, the potato capital, don’t bother cutting up the seed for Caribou russet, Kennebec or Yukon Gold yellows, Purple Majesties, Red Marias or Russian banana fingerlings.
Ever tried German Butterball potatoes? Not all potato are the same. It’s goes way beyond, much further than just how you cook or prepare them.
Vessey’s Seeds, Fedco, Johnny’s, there are all good outlets for what you need to plant your Maine vegetable garden seed catalog.
How has your experience good, bad or meh been with any garden seed outlet?
The revolving steel display packed racks often have duds. Not the highest seed germination rate. Precision planting means don’t waste areas of your garden with too large a spacing of seeds. Or empty spots that nothing grows and wastes the effort put into creating the fertile seed bed to plant, feed, weed, water, harvest.
In Maine, lots of Amish farm settlements mean you can inexpensive get your tomato and pepper plants cheaply from up the road.
Checking the PH of the soil, adding the amendments to keep it fortified and side hill dressing to nurture your vegetable garden plants. All part of the garden prep and ongoing maintenance to increase the enjoyment and bounty of the home grown farm to table food. If you have been on the Me In Maine blog before, you no doubt have caught more than just a few posts on growing family farm food.
I get excited to scan the seed catalog pages of corn, peas, beans of all types.
New garden seed varieties that are touted as bigger, better, tastier and some that you never allocated a space to try. Egg plant, usually start with six transplant tall healthy seedlings. Then thumbing through a good book or scanning the net for ways to good them differently than last year. Radishes, leaf lettuce, scallions and shallots.
And talk about farm fresh Maine corn.
Gotta have corn on the cob but which varieties to grow tall and offer the best variety?
When we sold garden produce on the Maine farm growing up, there were two main choices of corn.
Smaller red and green ears of white and yellow corn, called Sugar and Gold variety. Big, full yellow only kernels of corn that had size and taste when boiled up and butters, salted.
The best variety of Maine garden seed corn we found on the farm to be Early King.
Vegetable garden seed catalog. In the final analysis, the truck garden customer driving in and out of the farm give their two cents. Farm fresh vegetable sales reflected the people’s choice of what they loved most and returned over and over for more.
You may gave heard the story of the rusted Rambler and shiny Lincoln that visited the Maine farm stand.
As a nine year and growing up on a Maine farm, it was quite an experience dealing with the public. Maintaining the quality of the vegetables picked and arranged for sale. For anyone turning into the yard and looking for farm fresh vegetable produce.
We also grew lots of varieties of strawberries which need to be stored in a cool cellar and can perish quickly even with the best handling practices. Vegetable garden seeds catalog.
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I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |
MOOERS REALTY 69 North ST Houlton ME 04730 USA