How to Select Seeds for Your Garden

In my last post I spoke about purchasing and sorting seeds. The beauty of the many catalogs and the multitude of varieties that are available are amazing, but it can also be very overwhelming.

There are some affiliate links or adds in this article. Clicking on these links does not cost you any extra money, but helps give us a small boost towards making our homestead dreams come to fruition. While we encourage shopping local we also realize that is not always possible. Please see our full affiliate disclosure here.

How do you determine what you should grow in your garden space?

This is especially important if you are growing in a small amount of space like we are. Again, don’t get so caught up in the decisions that you don’t get anything done. If it is your first year growing, pick 2 or 3 main staples and stick to those. There is a lot to learn in your garden about the way things grow, what can hinder your progress (pests, watering, frost, heat) and it will be beneficial to have time to get really great at growing a few things before you add more into the mix.

What to Grow

The quick and easy answer is to grow what you eat. Delving further into that answer and figuring out what those items are can be a bit tougher. Are your family’s favorite foods actually your family’s favorite foods? A great example of this at our house is that “no one likes peas,” but when I look at our grocery receipts from this winter I found that we bought a lot of bags of frozen mixed veggies. The bag that we buy contains: corn, carrots, peas, string beans, and lima beans. So, in reality our family does like peas. Because of this discovery, this year we are adding shelling peas to our grow list.

Take a look at your grocery receipts. What do you tend to buy a lot of? Then determine whether or not that will be a plant that you can grow in your region. No matter how much my family likes pineapple or mangos, living in Maine, those items just aren’t going to go on our “grow list.”

How much can you grow/fit in your garden space?

When determining how much you can fit in your garden think about space savers. Peas, beans, cucumbers, and some squashes can be grown “up,” meaning you can grow them with a small amount of plot space, but grow them up a trellis or pole. Last year we had a bed of carrots but then grew cucumbers in the back row and up a trellis.

How are you going to use your harvest?

You’ll also want to determine how you are going to use those items. Ask yourself a few more questions. Are you going to just try to eat fresh veggies all summer and then use store bought items during the winter? Do you want to try to store some in your basement? Are you going to can them or freeze them? Certain varieties lend better to different practices and my two favorite seed catalogs (Johnny’s and Fedco) both have great information in their item descriptions about what freezes well, what stores well, what cans well, etc.

These are all great questions to ponder while we look out at our snow covered yards and pour through beautiful seed catalogs.

Remember, the best thing you can do is to do something.