It's seed time!

It's that time of year when the mailbox is full of seed catalogs and it's time to start planning the garden!  This year will be our first real opportunity to have a garden and I was very excited to start ordering seeds.  I love looking through seed catalogs, some of them are like works of art.  I love Territorial's catalog as well as Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  This year we decided to order most of our seeds from Seed Savers Exchange.  I love that their seeds are heirloom so hopefully we can save some seeds from our crop this year and use them next year.  I also like that members can donate heirloom seeds and it's like a community of seed savers that share with one another.

We don't have a huge space for a garden so I'm worried I went overboard a little bit but here is what we bought:

Bean, Climbing French , Packet 50 seeds
Cucumber, Japanese Climbing OG, Packet 25 seeds 
Eggplant, Listada de Gandia OG, Packet 25 seeds
Lettuce, Rossa di Trento , Packet 250 seeds 
Pea, Golden Sweet OG, Packet 50 seeds
Radish, Early Scarlet Globe , Packet 250 seeds 
Pepper, Garden Sunshine , Packet 50 seeds
Pepper, Georgia Flame OG, Packet 25 seeds
Spinach, Bloomsdale OG, Packet 250 seeds
Squash, Muscade de Provence , Packet 25 seeds
Tomato, Brandywine (Sudduth's Strain), Packet 50 seeds
Tomato, Amish Paste , Packet 50 seeds
Tomato, Lemon Drop OG, Packet 25 seeds
Watermelon, Stone Mountain OG, Packet 25 seeds
Flower, Red Marietta , Packet 250 seeds 
Sunflower, Sunflower Mixture, Packet 100 seeds

I'm most excited about the Muscade de Provence which is a 'cheese' pumpkin - one of those creepy green orange pumpkins that are always so pretty but way too expensive to buy in the store.  I'm also excited about our tomatoes.  Two years ago I canned 28 quarts of pure tomato sauce and this passed year I was only able to can about 8.  I'm missing my tomato sauce!  Hopefully we'll have a nice bunch this year to can.  We still have some work to do in the garden before anything gets planted but hopefully it will start to warm up and we can add some sand and raised beds.   For now, we'll be starting the seeds inside probably using my Aerogarden although right now it has persimmons and witch hazel seeds in it, I'll just have to make room!  Hooray for backyard gardens!

As a side note, I love this garden journal as seen in Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Sewing & Fabric crafts:

If only I could justify the time to spend making that I would.  Too cute.