In preparation for my yearly seed swaps, trades and round robins I like to get all my extra seeds packaged up and ready to go ahead of time. This year, I decided to add lots of information on each packet. Writing all the information by hand seemed like a drag so I created a bunch of 2” x 2 ¾” labels (finally, a use for obsolete floppy disk labels!) with fun clip art. I included the name, seed source, year, my website address and notes on each seed package. How handy, how organized!

Apparently I wasn’t organized enough as I completely forgot my list of things to look for at Seedy Saturday. Yikes! Thankfully, I got my partner to email me the list to my Blackberry, which I kept re-reading while maneuvering through the throngs of people at the event. It’s great that there are many people interested in gardening and starting seeds, however, this year the number of attendees seemed somewhat ridiculous. Last year there was freezing rain, wet snow and icy roads, which may have kept people at bay. Here’s how things looked at 11:30 AM:

We walked in at 9:45 AM and the first stop was the seed swap table where I dropped off all of my nicely (and some not so nicely) packaged seeds. Seriously, it must have been somewhere between 30 – 40 packets of stuff, mostly seeds I’d saved and a few things I no longer wanted (goodbye Sensation squash from Stokes!). In turn, I picked up a packet of daisy petit pom pom mix, green apple eggplant, Roma tomato, striped butternut, yellow submarine cucumber, bouquet dill, patio pickles, Thai basil, snow peas and purple pole beans.

I also went a little crazy with the seed purchases and bought some Vegetable Spaghetti squash; Yellow and Black Brandywine, Old German, Opalka and Break O’Day tomato; Ailsa Craig onion; Chantenay Red-cored and mixed carrot; Provider bush bean; Lolla Rosa, Freckles Speckled Trout and Red Deer Tongue lettuce; California Wonder sweet pepper and Cherokee Trail of Tears pole bean seeds. My 8-year-old nephew wanted to start some seeds so we got him some packets of carrot and sunflower. My mom had a great time and said that she could spend all day there!

I ran into some familiar faces: Bernie from La Vie En Rose (I helped her dig up her iris bed a couple of years ago), Mary from the Cottage Gardener (we visited her farm last year and did a bit of impromptu throat singing), another Kemptville area gardener as crazy about tomatoes as me and Telsing from The Veggie Patch Re-imagined.  Here she is with her two kids at the seed swap table:

The one thing I wish I had done last year was to make a list of all the vendors who had attended – I had contacted the organizer after Seedy Saturday 2008 who lamented that there were too many and didn’t have the paperwork handy.  So I decided to make my own list this year.  Here are the majority of the attendees for this year’s Seedy Saturday in Ottawa (in no particular order, * denotes a seed vendor):

• a seller of honey from Morrisburg, ON
• La Vie En Rose Gardens *
  
• Patri-Semences/Les Serres de Chez Nous *
• Greta’s Organic Gardens *
  
• Cosmoz Design
• Capital Worm Ranch
• Yuko’s Open Pollinated Seeds *
  
• Honey Pie Hives and Herbals
• a seller of cocoa camino
• Eternal Seed *
  
• Karen’s Naturals
• La Ferme de Bullion *
• Terra Foods
• a few sellers of baked goods and breads
• Heritage Seed and Produce *
  
• The Worm Factory
• Tucker House CSA
• Tomboy Tools
• Square Foot Gardening
• Arborisan Wood Craft
• Urban Harvest *
  
• Just Food
• Savour Ottawa
• Canadian Organic Growers – Ottawa
• Green Party
• USC Canada
• Keriba Inc
• The Collective Conscience
• The Green Collection
• Eastern Ontario’s Gardener’s Tour Guide

If you’re in the Ottawa area, have missed Seedy Saturday and don’t mind driving, you can go to the Seedy Saturday being held in Kingston this weekend, Saturday March 14, from 10 AM to 3 PM at Kingston’s Central Branch Library, 130 Johnson Street.  Admission is $1.  I’ve called ahead and found out that the following seed vendors will be there:

• Seed Savers Exchange
• Eternal Seed
• the Cottage Gardener
• Greta’s Organics
• Heritage Seeds
• Terra Edibles

If the roads are good, I can get to Kingston in an hour.  Hmm, something to think about.  Happy seed hunting!

She’s a Catahoula Leopard Dog/Beagle mix rescue and is super sweet!

My holidays were spent house training, sourcing puppy crack treats and tons of toys.  We’ve had her almost three weeks and she loves dried liver, her Tick and Tuck toys and chicken nyla bones.

Scattered Gardening Thoughts:

• This is the year that I will send in my seed orders early so that I will have them by their sowing date.  This to the power of ten.
• I don’t seem to care that Maui likes romping in and about my flower beds, biting off dried stems and seed heads that I left for “winter interest”.
• My winter sowing project is on hold as the nice, plastic bins I bought and fixed up last year have begun to break and crack in this weather.  A couple are still salvageable though.
• I have too many tomato seeds.  Too many.

Happy new year!

On the way back, we stopped off at Richter’s Herbs, the mecca for Canadian herbs. I was pretty excited to check out their plants for sale and entered their stinking-hot greenhouse in anticipation.

Oh man, someone really needed to crack a window in there as I started sweating immediately upon entering. It was too bad as it would have been nice to stay longer but it was just too ridiculously hot and humid. I headed towards the mint section, specifically looking for the New Westerfield hybrid mints, a trademark of mint-crazy Jim Westerfield in Illinois, USA.

Mint does not come true from seed (meaning it may or may not have the same characteristics as the parent plant) and the best way to ensure that you have the right type is to get a cutting or buy a plant. Since I wanted to get a mint that would do well candied in a glass of iced tea or lemonade, I decided to buy a Fruit Sensations mint. At Richter’s, I kept lightly rubbing the leaves to smell the subtle differences between the different plants, however, at some point all the smells got jumbled together. I do have to say that Sweet Pear (one of the first ones I sniffed) didn’t really smell as much like pear as I’d hoped and Jim’s Fruit mint has a real in-your-face minty scent.

I also picked up some Thai basil, Vietnamese coriander, lime balm and Zorba Red oregano, an ornamental. The only thing I regret not looking for was zaatar, a Middle Eastern herb used in hummus.

Of course there were seeds:

and gifts:

We packed up our herb plants, got back in the air-conditioned car and tootled off to the Cottage Gardener!

We happened to catch them on their last day of selling plants to the public. There was a little nursery with all of their plants for sale:

We did a quick tour of their isolation beds, separated by distance and trees to reduce cross-pollination.

Since Sunday was their last day, they were going to plant all of the plants that were left-over from their stand. They also get late frost in their area and were waiting until this week to start planting out into their isolation beds.

Here’s a funny little story:

My dad was one of the founders of the Organic Crop Producers & Processors (OCPP) back when we were growing up. My sister, then a teenager, designed the logo. When I checked the Cottage Gardener’s website for their address on my phone, I noticed they had been certified organic by OCPP so I told them the story about our family and how my sister had created the logo. Well, they were so happy to meet her they gave her a Djena Lee’s Golden Girl tomato plant, an heirloom tomato plant chosen by Slow Food USA as part of its Ark of Taste.  This is the first year that the Cottage Gardener had this variety and it was so new that it wasn’t in the catalogue yet.  So of course, I wanted one too so we bartered and my sister and I did some Inuit throat singing for a Djena Lee for me. I have to say that was the first time I’ve ever throat sang for a plant!

I’ll have a report on the Kemptville Farmer’s Market and Veg Stock as soon as I relax a bit from our whirl-wind trip.

The kick-off is this weekend, in conjunction with the Dandelion Festival, that highlights Veg Stock, an outdoor music festival and fund raiser for the Kemptville Farmer’s Market. Veg Stock takes place at Sunday, June 8th at 15 Clothier Street East from noon until dusk. The Farmer’s Market itself will be held in the parking lot of the Courthouse at Prescott and Water Street on Sundays from 2 – 4 PM.

I picked up a 10′ x 10′ First-Up canopy tent for the occasion as well as a folding chair (not pictured):

It’s pretty easy to set up, requiring two people to go up and one person to tear down. It’s quite roomy underneath. Since the market will be on pavement I’ll have to figure out something as a weight for those windy days. I found some great tips here.

My partner and his mom have graciously offered to sell my tomato plants for the June 8th event (yay!) as I’ll be out of town this weekend (boo!). They’ll also be selling some fresh rhubarb and home made rhubarb jam. In the future I plan to offer vegetables, baked goods, dog treats and Inuit crafts.

Exciting!

I had been preparing all week putting together accurate descriptions of each cultivar with photos and name tags. I also printed out tip sheets on transplanting tomatoes. On Friday I prepared the signs for my sale using old hanging file folders, sheet protectors (there was a chance of rain), printed pages with date, address, time and the words “Heirloom Tomato Plant Sale”.

I really debated on the wording of the signs for my plant sale. I wanted to distinguish my seedlings from commercial cultivars, however, not all of my tomatoes were heirlooms. Most are open-pollinated which means you can save seeds from the fruit and it will produce plants identical to the parent (so long as there is no cross-pollination). “Open-pollinated” didn’t sound as nice as “heirloom” and might be confusing to people. The term “heirloom” is contentious in itself so I decided to use it as per Dr. Carolyn J. Male’s description as a cultivar that has been passed down through several generations of a family because of its valued characteristics.

I scrounged around for some stakes, pounded them into the ground with my rubber mallet and taped the file folder on the inside to the stake and the two sides together on the outside. This was the sign that I had on my lawn:

I put two signs on the main road and two more signs on my street. Next year I think I’ll use taller pieces of wood and will staple the signs to it rather than fussing around with tape. I may also make the “Heirloom Tomato” part of the sign bolder and bigger as some people thought it was a flower plant sale. I think I’ll also do some better advertising, perhaps putting something in the local paper and also some signs at the grocery store and the post office. I pretty much decided at the last minute that I was going to have this tomato sale so I think with some extra preparation next year I’ll have lots more traffic.

Friday night I borrowed a table and a couple of pieces of wood to use as my set-up. I started bringing my tomato plants from the deck in the backyard to set them on the tables in the garage overnight. I should have taken an inventory to help me keep track of each plant I sold. I’ve got a list of all the tomatoes I have on the sidebar under 2008 Tomato Plant List.

I was really torn on what to charge for each plant, right up until the day of sale. I finally decided to charge $3.50 for the large tomatoes (mostly Cherokee Purple that had been started on March 24), $3 for the bulk of the tomatoes (started on March 30), $2.50 for the ones that still looked big but not as big as the $3 ones and then $2 and $1 for the smaller ones that had a late start or got stunted by a bit of sun burn. I arranged the tomatoes by size into rows on three different tables and a shelf. I attached name badges with the name and picture of each cultivar at the head of each row and taped descriptions in front of each row. My plant sale looked like this:

Here is my $3.50 table of Cherokee Purple tomatoes:

My $3 table of Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Blondkopfchen, Black Plum, Black Pear, Black from Tula, Canabec Rose, Earliest + Best, Sweetie, Bonny Best, Eva Purple Ball, Green Zebra, Old Flame, Moscow, Sausage-Opalka, Red Lightning, Arkansas Traveller, White Wonder, Mirabelle Blanche and Colour Mixture:

Not pictured is a three-tiered chrome shelf to the left. Here’s a couple of close-ups of the $3 table:

My $2.50 table of Pruden’s Purple, Red Lightning and Earliest + Best:

My $2 and $1 table of Old Flame, Arkansas Traveller, Box Car Willie, Eva Purple Ball, White Wonder, Mirabelle Blanche, Green Zebra, Pruden’s Purple, Hawaiian Pineapple, Marmande, Black from Tula and Aunt Ruby’s German Green:

That morning I dug up some extra pots of flowers that I wanted to get rid of, like lily of the valley, bleeding heart and mountain bluet.

I also dragged out some of the extra vegetable seedlings that couldn’t fit in my garden, such as Black Eel zucchini, Canada Crookneck squash, chives, Montreal Melon, Smart Pickle cucumber, Stowell’s Sweet corn and Waltham Butternut squash.

I sold 6 plants to my first customer at 8:45 AM and 4 plants to my second customer at 9 AM who had found out about my sale from my first customer. Lots of people stopped by just to look (a.k.a. garage sale crowd) and I didn’t have my third customer until 10:30 AM. A couple more sales around 11 AM, 12:30 PM, 1 PM, 1:45 PM and 2:15 PM. In between customers I managed to plant my trellised cedar box with pole beans and vining spinach and half-barrel with annuals. Some questions I got were, “What’s a good tomato for sandwiches?”, “Which tomato has low acid?” and “What tolerates a lot of heat?”. Next year I think I’ll have an alphabetized chart of the cultivars with a check box for easy reference to help me answer these questions.

I sold 28 tomato plants and all of my flowers and vegetable seedlings and made $110. Not bad for just having four signs thrown up at the last minute.