You Can Always Cheat

If your seeds, little packages full of promise, don't live up to their promise, you can cheat. You can buy plants and plant them.

My spring seeds did great. My fall seeds--not so much. I planted broccoli twice. All of them died.

My cheat (please realize that I am joking. I don't really think it's cheating. I just wish the seeds had done well.)

Broccoli seedlings from the store. I am fighting a little bit of
purpling of the leaves, which is supposedly caused by a
need of bone meal (phosphorus, specifically). I have applied
bone meal. Do I need more?
 

I planted 100 onion seeds. All but 3 of them died. I bought sets at the store. (And forgot to photograph it.)

I planted Swiss chard twice. Only 2 came up. My "cheat".

Swiss chard by the Lincoln English peas. I have 7 more planted.
I hope they do well. I really want these this year. 

A couple years ago, I planted milkweed for the monarch butterflies. All of it died.
My "cheat."

Yellow flowers flopping over with the weight of their seedpods are
milkweed. Watch, I bet the seeds will have me overloaded
with volunteers. But the seedpods are so cool! I will have
to post pictures of them. Do you know that they gave children
money for collecting seed pods during World War 2? The seed
pods are so light that they used them to stuff life jackets for flyers, so they
paid children to collect them. Cool trivia, in my opinion.

Beans for Spring Planting

Good Mother Stallard beans saved for seed

Well, I have pulled most of the Good Mother Stallard bean plants from the garden. The ones that remain are really dead. I just haven't untangled them from the invisible trellis.

I didn't have as good a harvest as I would have liked, but I have tasted the beans (because I ordered and ate some from Rancho Gordo). I know that I want them in the garden, so I saved every single bean that the garden produced.

I ended up with about 170 seeds. That should be enough to plant a good many in the spring and still have some seed set aside. (Seed Savers Exchange always advises their members to save some of their seed in case something happens to the ones they have planted. You don't want to have a rare heirloom seed and lose it all.)