It's Time to Plan Your Victory Garden and Stock up on Seeds

It may be winter, but mama never stops gardening. Right now it's planting time and organizing seeds. Let's see how she does it. Hey, Provider Preppers, I'm Jonathan. And I'm Kylene. And yes, I know that I am the crazy plant lady. And this is what I love. In fact, my mother-in-law came over yesterday and I was organizing these binders. And she said, you've got about $500 worth of seed here. And I'm like, oh yeah, at least that. I know, but seeds are really, really important. Because without them, we can't have a good garden. And we need to make sure that the seeds that we have are heirloom or open pollinated. Because when you save the seeds from those plants, they will produce a plant similar to the parent plant. Now, the reason why that's important. For instance, one year I had these beautiful pumpkins. And I bought them at the store. And I thought, I'm going to save seeds from these and plant them for next year. Well, the next year when I planted them, I got gourds. Now, I wouldn't have cared if it was a different pumpkin from the original one. But gourds aren't really that edible. And so that's one of the things that you might come across and why it's really important that you have seeds that will come up true to the parent next year. Now, I do have some hybrid seeds like sun sugar tomatoes. Wow, those are my favorite. And I can only propagate those plants by through clippings of the original plant, which I have some in my indoor garden right now, or by buying the seeds. So, you know, if bad comes to worse, I'm not ever going to have sun sugar tomatoes. But I have a huge variety of really great things. Now, I'm the planner. And John does all the work. So I come up with the ideas. I have three separate gardens. Well, yeah, three separate gardens. The first one is a little indoor garden that's going now that we have green beans in. And I've got some tomatoes. And I've dug up pepper plants. And they are actually growing. And they'll be replanted. They're producing right now. But they'll be replanted in the garden in the springtime as soon as it warms up enough to, well, I guess early summer so that, you know, there's no risk of frost for them. But they'll produce within a month. And so I'll get peppers really early off those plants. So that's my one garden. The second garden that I have is the kitchen garden. And that kitchen garden is where I go when it's time to make dinner and I need something for dinner, I just walk out the door and I can harvest the herbs that I need or the greens that I need, cherry tomatoes, things like that, that don't take up a huge amount of space that I want access to all the time. And then the third garden is the beautiful garden that John built for me last year so that I could have some real nice raised beds and improve my production garden. And in that garden, we grow like the tomatoes that we're going to can and we grow the corn and all of the big plants and the things that we're going to preserve for the next year. Let's talk a little bit about planning your garden. Because, okay, I can get addicted to seeds, right? And I can look through the catalog and just decide I want to spend a lot of money on seeds. So we need to plan it. And there are a couple places that have some good planning guides. If you just go online, you can look for them. But Jason at Seeds for Generation has some great ones. I'll leave you a link. I really like his business. It's a little family-operated business and they sell seeds. And whenever we can support a family-operated business, I think that's a really good thing. Another thing, one of these, I have a planning calendar in. And the planning calendar is really cool. This was actually produced by our late friend, Kenneth Moravec, who died recently. And that was a real tragedy for us. He's a great friend and has done a lot in the Prepper community. But he was a great gardener and he shared his skills with a lot of people. And that's one of the things that I would recommend. Find somebody who knows how to garden. If you're new to this, most of them love to share the trade. And especially in your area, they'll know what works in your area best and what varieties. So yeah, look up these people. Figure them out and let them help. So in Kenneth's calendar, he has all kinds of... This was actually a while back, from 2017. But he has on his calendar what all the tasks are that he needs to do. When he needs to plant indoors for each different crop. When to start it. And he just, he had it all laid out. Now you could totally do this and have even reminders sent if you plugged yours into something like a Google Calendar. If you like to just write things out by hand, there are ones that you can purchase. This is from MI Gardener. Luke is the MI Gardener and he's got a fantastic YouTube channel. His book, I just read his autopilot garden book. I took it on a field trip. We were going on a field trip with our son for a choir trip. And it was about a three-hour drive. And it's an easy read. I was able to finish it on the way up. He's got some good stuff in here. If you're a beginner, it's a really good option. But the autopilot garden, the premise of it is that it does most of the work itself. It's planting in such a way that you have minimal intervention. It takes the least amount of time. He's also got this little planner that goes with it. The planner's kind of cool. It's not something that I would use because my production is way too big for this. But if you are a beginner, this might be a really good way to start learning. So in the past, I've gone through all different ways to store my seeds, right? This is really effective. But what I found is I really want to journal more. And I'm not a fan of journaling this way. But what I decided to do this year is I created these binders. And in each one of these binders... So this one happens to be for spring and fall. And I don't mix those seeds because I've got a lot of seeds. What I did is I took these... These are intended for photos. And so there's four pockets. And instead of putting photos in here, I put the seed packet. And the reason why... Okay, these are actually survival garden seeds. They are one of my favorites. Like, I am totally serious. I love the way that there's the picture on the front. Some of my seed packets don't have pictures on the front. And that means that I have to get out my glasses. And I have to figure out what they are. But this, it's real obvious to me what it is. And so I really appreciate that. It kind of makes gardening more exciting. And on the back, it tells me exactly how I need to plant it, when I need to plant it, and if I'm going to save seeds, how I save seeds. So with this system, I want to be able to save this envelope so that as I save the seeds for the next year, I can put them in here. But I'm going to save the envelope because this is really good reference. And I don't want to have to write all this down again. So I'm pretty excited about this. The other thing that I can do with these is slip three by five cards in here with the notes about how it all worked, right? What was good about it, what was bad about it, what maybe what I want to plant it next to for companion planting, different notes like that. And I think that should work really well. Now, I'm still going to have these because quite frankly, some of the seeds that I have are much too large to keep in here. And so I do like these and I'm going to totally keep them. But I think this is a great way for me to organize this. I would like to put in a plug for Survival Garden Seeds. They have several different kits. If you use that promo code, A Provident Prepper, it'll give you 10% off. This one is $100, so it's $90 with the promo code. But there's 100 seed packets in here. And they've done a really good job of being smart about it because if you just plant one crop, you're going to have problems with soil nutrition and disease and insects and all kinds of things. But if you're planting companion plants and you're planting the right flowers around them and all those kinds of things, you're going to have a better quality garden and it's going to have less trouble. And so in this packet, in these packets, they have done that and I've just been totally impressed. They have a little, just a little one for guard or for apartments that has things that grow smaller that you might be growing on your patio. And then they've got both the Home Garden and the Homesteader Pack. And each of them are a little bit different and you never know exactly what seeds you're going to get because it depends on what's available. But I totally, I would highly recommend that for me having them and being able to put them in these binders where I can see them. And we used them last year for our garden and I loved it. The seeds germinated really well. I didn't have any problems with any of them. I just can't say enough positive about them. So if you are starting your garden, that's a really good way to go about it. Now, that is not the only place that I get seeds. I use that for my foundation, but then I still purchase other heirloom seeds that I might want something special or a different variety or something like that. And so, you know, that's a really good way. And then start saving all your seeds. Buy your seeds now. Because I was shocked when Johnny's seeds, they went up so much instead of it being three or four dollars a packet. Now it's five and six dollars a packet. And that really adds up quickly. So the more that we can produce on our own, the better off we'll be. And if you're my friend or neighbor, sharing seeds wouldn't be a big deal at all. Right. The question of the day for you. How do you plan your garden? And how do you organize your seeds? Share with us. And thanks for being part of the solution.