Ecovale Farm

As you can see, there’s some variation in how much money is spent on the packaging. The smallest company is the one that uses the plain yellow envelopes, then there’s another Ontario one that uses just a couple of different envelope images (vegetables, herbs, flowers) and has the pretty box for their pollinator-friendly package; then I think it’s likely a tie between the one that uses the brown envelopes and the one that uses images of each vegetable/fruit on its own package but prints them on paper and glues them into envelopes… I will let you puzzle out which ones are from which companies, if you like! There's also a pack of my own seeds saved from last year. 

I have seeds for a slew of produce, in part so I can grow a variety of vegetables and fruit, in part because I like to try out new varieties and see how they do, in part to have produce throughout the season, and in part because sometimes some of them just sound really fun. Like the blue pumpkin I will attempt for the first time this year! So fingers crossed, there will be some ready in the fall. 

On a side note, and before I list some other varieties that may be of interest, several of what are generally considered "vegetables" because we grow them in our gardens with other actual vegetables, are technically fruit. The most common examples are tomatoes and peppers! There are others as well, and the odd grain that we generally grow in "vegetable" gardens. I have a great shirt that says "Eat your Veggies!" but has corn kernels running around looking scared... I bought it because corn is a grain and I figured the person that designed the shirt didn't know that. 

As for the varieties, I have a couple of colours of bean seeds, Tonda di Parigi carrots, Maya habanero peppers (another couple of first attempts), national pickling cucumber, music garlic, toma verde tomatillos, autumn beauty sunflowers, and Mandan Bride decorative corn. The trick now that I have the seeds is to get them from their tiny packages of potential plant all the way to fully grown fruiting plant producing edible parts. Incidentally, we eat a lot of different parts of plants when we eat produce - leaves, roots, fruits, seeds, seedpods, flowers (I will have some edible flowers again this year).

I am planning to have my kids help me with the messy job of putting soil into starting packs or pots, which sit in trays, which sit on shelves, which sit near a window getting lots of light; and putting the seeds into the starter packs then labelling them so when they sprout a week or so later I know what is where. 
So next time, on to sorting seeds by sowing times and requirements, and starting them early indoors. 

Enjoy the marginally warmer temperatures we are having!