Seed Order for a YEAR’S SUPPLY of Food (+ Tips for Each Variety)

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How much of each vegetable should you grow to feed a family what varieties work best what’s best to grow for a beginner should you start the plants inside or plant them directly in the garden what are the most important things to grow because we’re more than Farm even

Though it’s snowy and icy and really cold here in Ohio right now it’s time for us to start getting ready for our Spring Garden So today we’re going to put in our seed order and we’re going to give you all the details about the things that we’re going to be growing in

2024 our all-time favorite company for buying seeds is Berlin seed they’re out of like homes County Ohio it’s an Amish run company and so you can’t just go online and put your order in online they do have a website so you can download a free pdf of their catalog and then just

Call in your order we have used Berlin seed for years I used it even like growing up my mom would order from this catalog and over the years we’ve tried other companies here and there but we always just keep coming back to burin seed the germination right on their

Seeds is awesome and one of my very very favorite things about this company is that they have a lot of heirloom open pollinated and hybrid seeds but no genetically modified seed we are not sponsored by Berlin seed this is just our favorite company and you might want

To put your seed orders in before too late because we’ve told thousands of people about this magazine so get your seed orders in we have a handful of crops that we think of as our staple crops and then we have other veggies that we just kind of use to fill in the

Gaps and those are the ones that we’ll be telling you guys about first later on we’ll tell you about the staple crops and also we’re going to show you some of our very favorite books that we use to know how and when to start seeds and

When to plant them out Etc this year I would really like to plant enough sweet corn to actually like put some in the freezer and not just eat it fresh like we did last year we planted incredible variety last year and it was so good it

Had like no worm problems really it was it was just perfect it was super easy to grow in the past we haven’t grown much sweet corn for various reasons one of them being we have conventional corn Fields all around us and so we didn’t want the conventional corn to

Cross-pollinate with our sweet corn also I used to have blood sugar issues and corn is very sweet and starchy and so it was the type of thing I didn’t want to eat a ton of but the kids love it so much and so I decided that we’re going

To bring it back this year sweet corn is one thing I do not start inside I always direct sew it out in the garden it has a really good germination rate I have not had any problems with planting it outside I still have a little bit left I

Got like a4b bag and it did I don’t know like four small rows which was definitely enough for us for fresh eating I’m going to get another 1/4 PB bag and plant that and this this year and hopefully that will be enough for us to put in our freezer another thing that

We are going to be growing this year since we have more space is dried beans this is just another way that we can move towards more self- sustainability in the past I kind of gave these up just simply because they take a lot of space for how much much actual product you get

And they can also be a bit time consuming just to sort them after you shell them and stuff but this year we have kiddos who are the age where they can actually help us quite a bit so we are going to attempt dried beans again they have lots of protein and you don’t

Even have to preserve them you can just put them in these buckets so they’re a really really great staple to have the varieties that I’m going to try this year are tiger’s eye and dark red kidney dark red kidney is an heirloom and open pollinated and tiger’s eye is open

Pollinated but not an heirloom sweet peppers are one of my very favorite things to grow these would be great for beginning gardeners because they’re so easy they take like pretty much no work I mean you just plant them and then water them I start my seedlings indoors

For Peppers this year I’m going to be doing a new one called Big Red says it’s a thick walled very sweet red pepper the best nonhybrid bell peppers and then I’m also going to be doing orange Blaze which orange Blaze is a hybrid but it’s so beautiful and so delicious that I

Can’t help but plan it every year I’m also doing California wonder which is an heirloom and Jimmy nardello which is Cody’s personal favorite which is also an heirloom if you’ve never grown Jimmy nardello Peppers you definitely need to grow those this year I absolutely love them I’m not just like a big huge

Vegetable fan I like meat and milk and things like that but Jimmy nardella peppers I will go out of the garden and just eat those when they’re fresh and you won’t see much of in this video I’m not feeling very well so Michelle is taking this one on herself today this

Past year I put tomato cages on my peppers and I mean seriously my Peppers got like this tall in the tomato cages it was amazing the next thing on my list to grow this year is green beans so unfortunately I can’t find Carson green beans in this year’s catalog so I don’t

Know why they’re not in here I’m sure there’s other places online you can get them but I still have just a few left over from last year they’re actually wax beans they’re not green beans but they’re this beautiful yellow they stand out from the plant so they’re very easy

To pick I’m also going to grow some Contender green beans those are an heirloom green bean variety that I really love so I’ll get like a/4 lb bag of those and honestly I’m not going to grow very many green beans at all last year I grew two raised beds full and I

Had way more green beans than I knew what to do with I froze a whole bunch plus I have a whole bunch of canned green beans so next year I’ll probably just do like one rais bed F I also grew the Royal burgundy beans last year they’re an heirloom open pollinated

Variety and I really loved them they were beautiful but they didn’t have nearly as high of a yield and they also got really buge eaten for some reason so this year I decided not to do those green beans are really great thing for beginning gardeners they’re super simple

And like they’re very satisfying I guess you could say cuz you get a lot from one plant very very simple we grow a large percentage of our own food here in our Homestead but we do still buy some GR groceries I’m very intentional about buying groceries that are organic and

Non GMO and unfortunately I can’t always find those high quality ingredients at our local grocery store I really love ordering from Thrive Market which is today’s video sponsor we go through tons of beef gelatin in this house Cody uses it in his chocolate milk and I like to

Use it to make homemade yogurt unfortunately I cannot find the good stuff the grass-fed beef gelatin in my local store so Thrive Market is a wonderful place to get this collagen from Thrive Market is like half the price of what it is at our local grocery

Store so this is a steal for us Thrive Market is an online membership based grocery store with a mission to make healthy living affordable another item that I cannot find at our local grocery store is organic bread flour I really like to use some organic bread flour in

With my sourdough loaf it just adds some nice stretch to my spelt flour loaves as a Thrive Market member I save money every single time I put in in order and the cool thing is is that if I find a product somewhere else that’s a better price than Thrive markets they’ll match

That price for me you can tell that Cody put in this order because I found these in the bottom of the Box healthy marshmallows healthy being relative but you got to have some fun sometimes um these are non- GMO and the ingredients are better than normal marshmallows I

Also really like how the Thrive Market website streamlines shopping they have a feature that allows me to sort through their products by dietary preferences so for example if I only want to buy organic foods I can click on the organic option and then I will only see the organic foods

You can try Thrive Market risk-free because if you don’t make back your $60 membership fee and savings they’ll credit you the difference and right now if you use our link thrivemarket.com more than Farmers you can get 30% off your first order plus a free gift that’s

Worth up to $60 whenever I look through the lettuce section of seed catalogs I always get so overwhelmed there’s so many different kinds of lettuce so I kind of just stick with winter density and and this year I’m going to try Michelle seems fitting it’s an heirloom

And it sounds really great a crisp Batavian style lettuce that has thick crunchy red tinged leaves I’ve tried this before really liked it so I’m going to stick with those two kinds this year I like to grow lettuce in the spring as well as the fall I don’t even try to

Grow lettuce in the summertime it’s just too hot here and my kids especially hate bitter lettuce so there are ways to shade your lettuce and the things like that it’s just not really worth the trouble to me and when I did try shading it in the past the leaves weren’t as

Crisp and crunchy they were more like delicate kind of so I don’t know we just choose to eat lots of salads in the spring and the fall and we’re actually still this is January and we’re still eating some lettuce out of our raised bed it’s supposed to get down like into

The negatives this weekend so I’m probably just going to go and harvest all the lettuce out there and we’ll finish it off this weekend the only other green that I’m going to get this this year then is red Russian kale so the only time that I actually use Kale

Is for a soup called zupa Tuscana that’s so good and I was just like why wouldn’t I chop it and put it in freezer bags in the portions that I need for soup so I’m going to do that this year too what about arugula arugula is my favorite I

Never grow arugula we’re going to get arugula whatever I always direct seed my lettuce I never ever buy Lettuce at a greenhouse or anything like that lettuce is also a very very simple thing for beginning gardeners to grow it literally takes no work I mean you just water it

And watch it grow and then it’s delicious to eat no work being relative once again I’m going to try growing cucumbers this year so as you guys can see my cucumbers died it’s good that cucumbers aren’t one of our staple crops because we would die I stink at growing

Cucumbers we have really bad cucumber beetles also squash bugs and I just have never been successful with cucumbers on this property in other places yes but not on this property so this year I think I’m going to do diamant I think is how you say it and also homemade pickle

They’re both like a pickling cucumber and the reason I’m doing diamant is because it says nonbitter trait is unattractive to cucumber beetles I’ll believe it when I see it I’m just probably going to grow like one rais bed full of cucumbers we might try to put

Like a row cover over them this year I’m not sure you can see here I do have a decent amount of pickles canned we already ate a bunch of these but the only reason I was able to can so many pickles was because a friend in the

Community took pity on me and sent me like bushels of cucumbers it was amazing one of the things that I’m most excited about this year is growing herbs so I haven’t been growing tons of herbs in the past just to cut down on time but

This year I plan to grow a full raised bed full of herbs some of them I’m going to start indoors and some of them I’m going to buy at a greenhouse growing herbs and flowers at home isn’t nearly as easy as growing like vegetable seedlings and stuff so the ones that

Look worth it to me for the amount of time it takes to germinate I will buy in this magazine herbs like parsley basil Dill anything like that those are super easy here it says time takes 14 to 21 days to germinate so I’ll probably just go ahead and buy time at the greenhouse

Also Sage I think I’ll buy that one at a greenhouse I’d also like to do some kundola I really really love making lotions I’ve done that in the past in the last few years with a baby and now a toddler I haven’t had time to make lotions and stuff like that but I

Definitely am going to start getting back into that again I also want to do chamomile and oregano and then nasterium and easia we already have mint plants and those just come up every single year on their own so I I already have chocolate peppermint Apple mint here

Stinging nettle that I harvested just I forged it from our field the other reason that I’m doing so many herbs this year is because Cody built a drying rack for me last year and it makes harvesting and drying herbs literally effortless I just lay them on the screen and then I

Take the dried leaves and pulse them in my blender the reason that I plan to do nestum this year is because I’ve heard they’re really good for keeping bugs down so I was like well I may as well try it and I like to every year do at

Least one or two different flowers last year I did snapdragons this year I’m going to do tulips and nestum just a word for beginning gardeners never ever ever feel ashamed of buying your plants your starts at green houses I think it’s a great way to support your local

Community and if it makes gardening doable for you then absolutely go to a greenhouse and buy your starts every year I buy sweet potato slips as well as cabbage and broccoli at a local Greenhouse those are some things I feel just do better from a greenhouse in the the very controlled perfect conditions

If you’re in the central Ohio area definitely check out yon’s Greenhouse we absolutely love that Greenhouse we personally know the people who run the greenhouse we love their practices all the things definitely check it out before we move on to our staple crops I just thought I’d show you our very

Favorite gardening books that have helped us so much in our gardening Journey this is my all-time favorite the yearr round vegetable Gardener by Nikki Jabor this book I love it so much because it has all of the dates of when you should plant things which vegetables are cold

Weather crops which of them are hot weather crops it gives lots of varieties I this is definitely a winner Cody’s all time favorite book this is the one that inspired him to get more into gardening he was very against gardening when we first got married Elliot Coleman’s the

New organic grower there’s also another one that goes with this Four Season Harvest by Elliot Coleman they just just like go over all the how-tos of gardening great great tips could not more highly recommend these books this one is absolutely amazing I know we’ve mentioned this before but if you want to

Get into like growing root vegetables and then having a cold room to store them in this book will help you so much I look at this book every single year cuz it’s amazing what all you forget during the winter what am I supposed to say the Berlin Seed Catalog also

Has I can’t say it Berlin Seed Catalog also has seed potatoes that we really love last year we did yukon gold and red Pontiac unfortunately the Yukon Gold potatoes had some pretty serious disease issues and we’re pretty sure it was a seed potato issue we are not blaming Berlin

Seed though they get the potatoes in from somewhere else so this year I don’t quite have the nerve I don’t think to plant Yukon Gold again I’m for sure going to do kbec and also red Pontiac those have always done well for us maybe we’ll do some Yukon Gold we haven’t

Decided yet stay tuned for that we planted around 40 lbs of sea potatoes this year and as you can see it was more than enough we still have like 16 crates of potatoes to work through before we Harvest next year potatoes are the kind of thing that some years they do really

Well and other years they don’t do quite as well and so I think next year I’m going to plant the exact same amount because we for sure want to have enough because this is a staple crop for us we really depend heavily on our white potatoes sweet potatoes are another one

Of our main staple props I feel like we did pretty good this year with a mount we might need a few more next year I don’t know I did 40 sweet potato slips last year it took up four solid raised beds I might do a few more this year I’m

Not sure the Berlin Seed Catalog does sell sweet potato slips they’ll send them out to you around the time where you should be planting them I don’t actually order my sweet potato slips though from the catalog because I just felt like if they come in the mail

They’re not quite as nice and they didn’t adjust quite as well when I planted them out in the garden so I get my sweet potato slips at a local Greenhouse that way I can get them exactly when I need them and I just feel like they’re nicer and do better the

Kinds that we did this year were vardaman and cubbington one of them has kind of like a pink skin and then a deeper orange flesh and the other one has more of a is lighter and has a more a little bit drier lighter flesh one thing that’s really important to us when

We’re looking for variet ities of sweet potatoes is to try to get sweet potatoes that have the potatoes right at the base of the plant that way you don’t have to like dig up your entire Garden I grew around 100 onion plants this year a bunch of them didn’t come up very well

The onion plants came a little bit too early it was a really wet spring and I couldn’t plant them out right away and so some of them had kind of dried up before I actually got them planted so they didn’t do quite as well as some

Years I mean the ones that did grow were really nice big onions but but I just didn’t get quite as many as I do sometimes and we only have one crate left so next year I probably will grow quite a few more onions the varieties of

Onion plants that I am going to order this year are Patterson and Redwing I’m just going to order two bunches one of them Patterson one of them Redwing I think there’s like 50 to 75 plants per Bunch this year I’m also going to buy some onion seeds and try growing some

Seedlings just under my grow light and then I’m going to kind of do a side by-side experience ment and see how the Homegrown seedlings do versus the bought ones my all-time favorite variety of carrots to grow that I will be growing again this year is Danver half long this

Year in the Seed Catalog they’re called danvers’s 126 and we might also try another variety called chanton red core it’s also a heirloom variety and it looks very similar to this so maybe we’ll do a little experiment and by the way this is January and these are our

Storage carrots they have a very very very great storage life as for how many of these I plan to grow honestly with carrots I find it kind of hard to like tell people a certain quantity because like you sew them and then you thin them and all the things I’m probably going to

Get like the half oun package and I just do a few rows in the spring a few rows in the fall I just kind of wing it honestly another one of our staple crops is butternut squash we really love butternut squash because you can throw

It in the root Celler and it will last forever it is amazing I save my own seeds this year I always do Walt ham Butternut I have tried different varieties like Honey Nut like the smaller supposedly sweeter squash but they did not last long at all in storage

And so I just always keep going back to wel ham I’m just planning to do one raised bed full of these I’m not going to be excessive because they’re very high maintenance for me with all our squash bugs I forgot here I also saved some Patty pan squash seeds seeds these

Are not a staple but I just thought I’d show them to you since they were in the freezer with the butternut squash seeds I consider garlic a staple crop just because it’s so so healthy it’s like this amazing source of medicine that I think is very important to have on hand

So I do consider garlic to be one of our staple crops I just grow spring garlic the Berlin Seed Catalog just has one option for spring garlic I usually just do like 6 to eight bulbs or so this year my garlic majorly failed I didn’t realize that I had planted it in very

Heavy soil so it didn’t do very well so I don’t have any left but there’s a ton of it in all of these sauces here as you can see here by my canning shelves tomatoes are definitely a staple here for us I make all of our sauces barbecue

Sauce ketchup marinara all the things with tomatoes last year I planted 15 plants and it was way I had way too many tomatoes I had tomatoes running out of my ears I finally just gave a whole bunch of them away and just just ignored them because there was no way I could

Use them all this year I’m going to do Amish paste that’s my favorite I’ll do that until I die probably and then celebrity plus California gold and Sun gold Sun gold is like a cherry tomato that’s orange they are so sweet and so good now that I’ve had those I like

Can’t even eat the red ones anymore I do really like determinate Tomatoes the California Gold as well as the celebrity plus are both determinant Tomatoes but the problem is is you can almost not find heirloom tomatoes that are determinant they’re all indeterminant for some reason or another

So next year we’re going to have to figure out some better ways of tring them because I do have issues with them just like falling out of the cages Eden what do you want I’m still hungry you’re hungry another crop that we consider a staple is broccoli the reason for this

Is because it’s so easy I plant like probably this year I’m going to do around 20 of them I feel like they’re pretty finicky under a grow light they can get leggy really fast so I just like to get these at a greenhouse broccoli is super easy to preserve so much easier

Than things like green beans that take a whole lot of like snipping broccoli you literally cut the head off take it inside and blanch it put it in freezer bags it’s really easy just to throw on a cookie sheet roast it with some olive oil and salt and pepper that’s one of my

Kids favorite vegetables it’s also really good in a quick like cheddar broccoli soup we’re in zone 6A so this year’s seed starting video might not come out quite soon enough for you but you can watch last year’s SE starting video right here to get all the information right now and make sure to

Head over to thrivemarket.com morean Farmers to get 30% off your first order plus a free Gift