Gardening Floyd: 4th Annual Floyd County Seed Swap Scheduled

The fourth annual Floyd County Seed Swap sponsored by Miracle Farm will be held at the Floyd Country Store on Saturday, February 18 from 10 am to 11:30 am.  This is a great way to meet local gardeners of all ages and experience levels and swap gardening stories and advice as well as seeds!  There will also be handouts on composting, vermiculture, germinating tips, seed age viability, and more.

Acceptable seeds for swapping are both left over commercial packets and home-saved seeds of heirloom or open pollinated varieties.  Please label your home-saved seeds with as much info as possible including the name of the variety and the year the seed was saved.  Seed saved from hybrid plants is not encouraged since it has a tendency to revert back to the undesirable traits of the hybrid's parent plants.

See ya there!

Check back in April for scheduling details for the follow-up seedling swap event!

Gardening Floyd: Plant a Seed

It's February first and nearly time to start seeds for crops that have a long growing season, need warmer temps for germination, or are just plain difficult to direct seed or get past the flea beetles.  Last year we started Violetta artichokes in January.  They require a very long growing season.  Hopefully they'll winter over and we can pick artichokes this year!  We amused the neighbors because they thought we had planted a row of bull thistles in our front yard.  Artichokes are members of the thistle family.

After having little luck starting healthy stocky transplants indoors we were about to give up.  We lusted after one of these but at $370 that so wasn't going to happen.

So Michael started researching and looking around and came up with this: