Or Judgment, depending on which style guide you follow.
When I started trying new varieties of plants in my little backyard garden, I did not quite grasp one obvious consequence: At some point, you have to thin down your seed collection.
Left to its own devices, my shoebox of seed packets exhibits reverse Darwinism: Survival of the un-fittest. It’s not merely that I end up with far too many packets of seeds. It’s that the long-term survivors are the duds — the ones I didn’t want to plant again. By contrast, plants with desirable traits are removed from my shoebox gene pool, because I planted the seeds and grew them.
It’s a nice metaphor for much of the junk in my life. The shirts I wear every day eventually wear out. The ill-fitting and the ugly remain until I haul them off to the thrift shop. The low-fat, low-salt cottage cheese slowly expires at the back of the fridge. But somehow my pantry has never held a bag of potato chips beyond its expiration date.
Why is this seed pack a loser? Let me count the ways.
Above: The starting point. It’s not quite as chaotic as it looks, because I have them sorted into categories.
1) I just ain’t gonna grow that vegetable any more.
Here, the varieties themselves are blameless. It’s mostly that nobody wanted to eat them, even if I grew them well. Or, in a few cases, that, plus they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth.
Maybe I’ll try to give these away. There’s nothing wrong with the seeds.
- Radishes
- Turnips
- Kale
- Swiss Chard
- Ground cherry
2) I ain’t gonna grow that variety any more.
Some of these just didn’t grow well. Some didn’t taste like much. And, to be clear, I’m tossing some not because they are intrinsically bad but because I could use the same space for better varieties.
2.1) Tomatoes
These all grew, but were disappointing for some reason. Some, I couldn’t tell when they were ripe. Others lacked taste. Some had poor yields, possibly due to operator error. But mostly, they aren’t themselves bad, it’s just that there were better varieties for my garden conditions.
2.2) Squash
At the end of the day, I’m sticking with a handful of tried-and-true varieties of winter and summer squash. As with the tomatoes above, the ones pictured here just didn’t do as well as other varieties that I planted.
From now on, I’ll do a couple of varieties of winter squash (Dickenson pumpkin, Waltham butternut squash), a couple of varieties of summer squash (prolific yellow straightneck, black beauty zucchini), and call it a day.
2.3 Cucumbers.
I’m giving up on cucumbers for the time being. Cucumber beetles are now endemic to my garden. I’m not willing to use the strong toxins it would take to get rid of them, and none of the varieties above is sufficiently resistant to bacterial wilt, spread by cucumber beetles. In addition, my attempt at growing parthenocarpic cukes under insect netting failed. I’m giving it a rest next year.
Conclusion
With that thinning, everything now fits in one plastic shoebox. In theory, I ought to vacuum-seal these seeds, so they’d last longer. In practice, I tend to use them up before they start failing to germinate.
This has been an odd post, in that all I talked about is the stuff that didn’t work. But every once in a while, you have to clean house. By its nature, that has to focus on the duds.
