Before I opened a single catalog this year, I opened the shoebox. It lives on the basement seed shelf, and this winter it held 37 packets: some full, some down to their last five seeds, and nine still sealed from last April, when I wandered down the hardware store seed rack without a list. I spread them across the kitchen table by crop, the way I sort crayons at the end of the school year, and that pile became the first half of our 2025 seed order. The second half cost $86.40.
Seeds were my most embarrassing line last year at $104. With a $450 garden budget for 2025, I wanted the catalog order well under $100 and the spring rack trips kept small.
What the shoebox already covered
Most seed keeps a few years if it stays cool and dry, but I didn't want to trust the older packets blindly. So I did a paper towel test: ten seeds rolled in a damp paper towel, sealed in a sandwich bag on top of the fridge, counted after a week. The 2022 San Marzano packet gave me 8 sprouts out of 10, which is plenty. The ancient jalapeño packet gave me 3, so it went in the compost and jalapeño went on the list.
Between the tests and the sealed packets, I already had San Marzano and Early Girl tomatoes, spinach, radishes, bush beans, cucumbers, a butternut squash and the marigolds I saved last fall. The ají dulce seed comes from my mom's plants, the way it always does, folded into an envelope with AJÍ written across it in her school-secretary capitals.
What made the list
- Hudson Valley Seed Company, $52.15: Cherokee Purple, Amish Paste, Matt's Wild Cherry and Black Cherry tomatoes, Genovese basil, a lettuce mix, 'Sugar Snap' peas, a zinnia mix and cilantro.
- Johnny's Selected Seeds, $34.25: Sungold and Juliet tomatoes, 'Carmen' sweet peppers, shishitos, fresh jalapeño seed, a yellow storage onion and a red onion.
The split isn't complicated. Most of what I grow is open-pollinated and comes from the Hudson Valley company, which is based up in Accord, in Ulster County. The hybrids I depend on, Sungold above all, come from Johnny's. The onions are new. I've only ever grown onions from sets, and this year I'm going to try starting them from seed in the basement during February break.
One thing I couldn't find was recao, the flat, saw-edged herb my mom calls the backbone of sofrito. When it's sold at all, it's usually listed as culantro, and neither catalog had it this year. If a packet turns up on a rack somewhere, I'll grab it. If not, cilantro will stand in, and my mother will remind me that it isn't the same thing.
What got cut
This is the part that hurt. Leeks and celery both went back on the "someday" page, because they need a long stretch under lights and my two shop lights are already spoken for by April. A small watermelon got cut after about ten seconds of honest thought: one vine would swallow half the west bed for maybe two melons. Ground cherries got cut because when I grew them once, we ate about six and the chipmunks ate the rest. A purple pole bean I loved in the catalog photo got cut because I had no answer to the question "climbing what?" The chain-link fence belongs to the peas in spring and the cucumbers and butternut after that.
I also talked myself out of a fourth cherry tomato. Four buckets on the porch, four cherry varieties. That's porch math, and porch math doesn't care how good the catalog description sounds.
The art packs
I'll admit the one place where my discipline slips. Hudson Valley Seed Company commissions artists to illustrate many of its packets, and as an art teacher I find them nearly impossible to resist. The zinnia packet this year is a loose watercolor of hot pink and tangerine blooms that look like they're about to fall off the paper. I'd have bought it for the picture alone.
The empty packets don't get thrown away. They go into a folder in my classroom, and every spring my fourth and fifth graders use them for a lesson on botanical illustration, where they design a seed packet for a plant that doesn't exist yet. Last year someone invented a "pizza tomato." I'm still thinking about it.
The order went in Thursday night, and I set aside about $12 for the hardware store rack in May, when I'll inevitably need something I forgot. Then I put the shoebox back on the basement shelf, lid on tight, so I wouldn't be tempted to look at it again until the onions go in.
