On Friday night, after Mateo went to bed, two seed orders went in from the kitchen table: $38.40 to Hudson Valley Seed Company and $33.75 to Fedco. Together that's $72.15, which is $14.25 less than last year's order. I checked the total three times before I believed it.
The savings didn't come from willpower. They came from a box of saved seed and a folding table at the library.
What we didn't have to buy
In September I fermented tomato seeds in jars and dried pepper seeds on labeled paper plates, and this winter it's paying off. The envelopes in my seed box now cover Cherokee Purple, San Marzano, Amish Paste and Matt's Wild Cherry, plus the ají dulce that started years ago as seed from my mom's plants. All of those are open-pollinated, so they should come back true to type.
Tomato and pepper seed also keeps for several years if it stays cool and dry, so a couple of the hybrids, like Juliet and Early Girl, were still in the box from earlier packets. I'll sow an extra seed per cell to make up for any lost vigor, and I'll know by April whether that was wishful thinking.
Then, on the first Saturday of the new year, the public library held its winter seed swap. I brought a stack of extra ají dulce and Matt's Wild Cherry seed in little envelopes folded from old catalog pages, and I came home with marigolds, cilantro and a packet of bush beans that someone has been saving for five years running. It felt like a good trade, and also like the most wholesome Saturday morning of my life.
The repeats
Most of this year's order is the same as last year, which is the point. I went through my catalog rules in December, and anything that earned its space stayed. Hudson Valley got the snap peas, lettuce, spinach, basil, cucumbers, sweet peas and the flower seed for a cut-flower row I'm planning, most of it in their art packs, which I will defend to anyone. Fedco got the onions, the leek, the celery, the two hybrid cherry tomatoes I was out of, Sungold and Supersweet 100, and more 'Carmen' sweet pepper seed.
Onions are the one thing I have to rebuy every single year. Onion seed loses its viability fast, and a packet from last February is mostly a packet of disappointment by the next one. I ordered three: a yellow storage onion, a red, and Ailsa Craig, a big sweet one. Last year's 60 onions at the end of the west bed were on the small side, and this spring I want more of them, and bigger, in the east bed.
The only change in the tomato lineup is in the porch buckets. Black Cherry is taking a year off so I can try Supersweet 100, an old reliable hybrid that sets long strings of small red fruit and that somehow I've never grown. Our tomato count is also going down, from 12 plants to 10, because I've finally admitted that eight tomatoes in a bed built for six was a mistake. Every spot has to earn its place.
The three gambles
My limit is three new things a year that take real space. Here they are.
Celery. Everyone says it's fussy: seed so tiny it needs light to germinate, months under the lights and a strong preference for steady water. I want to know whether I can grow a few plants worth putting in soup. If it fails, I'm out a $3 packet and the corner of one flat.
A leek. Just one variety, sown alongside the onions in February. Leeks take a long time but very little width, and I like the idea of pulling a few in October after the tomatoes are done.
Sweet peas. The flowers, not the vegetable. I want an 8-foot section of the chain-link fence covered in them this spring, for the smell alone. They'll start indoors in early February and go out in March, because they handle cold far better than I do.
What didn't make it: a striped Italian eggplant that I tabbed in pink in December and that lost its tab on the second read. It wants more heat and sun than our beds give it. I wrote it on the "someday" page of the notebook, which is where good ideas go to wait patiently.
The 2026 budget has $85 set aside for seeds, so this order leaves about $13 for the hardware store rack in spring, where I always find one more packet of zinnias. Fedco's confirmation said my order will ship later in the month, since they pack in batches during the busy season. That's the tradeoff for their prices, and it's why I order in early January. I'm watching the mailbox anyway.
