Thursday, December 5, 2024 - Best Garden Photos of 2024

Without ever going outside, and instead of working outside in the cold and wind, I got one of our gardening end-of-the-year jobs done today. I put up our annual Best Garden Photos of the year page. I wondered about renaming the page to something like 'My favorite garden photos," as many of the shots aren't all that great. But doing so reminded me that we've had some nice harvests in what has been a droughty year in our garden plots.

The best shot of the year turned out to be of our eighty foot row of zinnias in our East Garden plot. A close second was a shot of a BLT on December 2 showing "fresh" bright red tomatoes.

Wednesday, December 4, 2024 - Buying Guides

I'll get this one out of the way up front. If you are holiday shopping for a gardening friend, let me suggest taking a look at our The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners and our Shopping Guide for Gardeners. Both contain lots of things gardeners would like.

Now that my advertisement is out of the way, let's move on to December gardening chores.

With winter having set in, we're into the season of preparing for our next garden. While there's still a good bit of garden cleanup remaining to be done, building orders from reputable seed vendors is also a task for this month. That involves using seed catalogs (print, digital, and online) to find the items we need.

So far, we're a little light on print seed catalogs received in the mail. Fedco, the Seed Savers Exchange, Twilley Seeds, and High Mowing Organic Seeds are the only good ones I have to look through. But seed vendors have gotten their web sites updated and put up digital seed catalogs.

PDF Seed Catalogs Available

Botannical Interests, Burpee, Fedco, High Mowing Organic Seeds, Johnny's Selected Seeds, the Seed Savers Exchange, the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Territorial Seeds, Turtle Tree Seed Initiative, Twilley Seeds, and West Coast Seeds all have PDF versions of their seed catalogs online and available for download.

Monday, December 2, 2024

This morning's low temperature here was 15°F. We got a little more snow today. Of course, what we got is nothing like the Great Lakes area and the East Coast are experiencing.

I've had several tomatoes ripening in a tray on our dining room table. We used the last two good ones this evening for a supper of bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches with a side of our own sweet corn.

I'll admit that the tray ripened tomatoes weren't as delicious as ones that were vine ripened. But fresh homegrown tomatoes for sandwiches on December 2 is a first for us.

Our print copy of the Fedco Seeds 2025 catalog arrived in today's mail. I've just glanced inside it, checking green bean varieties and prices.

With our seed inventory pretty well done and catalogs arriving, it's about time for me to start putting together seed orders for next season.

Sunday, December 1, 2024

We received around an inch of snow overnight. Our weather outlook for the next week or so is with freezing temperatures every morning. But it will be mostly sunny which may allow some outdoor work.

Breakfast this morning was soup and bread.

FTC Required Disclosure Statement: Botanical Interests, High Mowing Organic Seeds, Park Seed, and True Leaf Market are some of our Senior Gardening affiliate advertisers. Clicking through one of our ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. We're also a consumer member of the Fedco Seeds Cooperative.

Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening