My every gardening season starts with buying seeds. I like to prepare during the autumn and early winter for the whole of next year. I plan the new garden and buy all the seeds before December without waiting for the next gardening season.

The reason for this is that in Croatia it’s hard to get seeds and sowing material during January and February, the first new materials get to the stores during March, which is a bit too late for me so I buy my seeds and materials during the existing season and store them for next year

Last October I bought most of the seeds, but I didn’t find the autumn seeds as they were sold out so I planned to buy them during this spring. Due to some family issues and lack of time and memory I just completely forgot to buy the seeds. Actually, I was so certain I bought everything and I thought I simply misplaced my seeds. I spent days searching until I realized that I don’t have a single autumn seed at home. Also, I realized that I don’t have any lettuce seeds and then it hit me that I didn’t buy my seeds, I forgot them. 

So I had to shop quickly for my seeds, and at the most unfortunate time. It’s summer holiday time and most of the online seed stores are not working. Luckily the Pšeno agricultural online store is working so I ordered a bunch of seeds from them.

Pšeno is mostly a professional store so they have a huge amount of different vegetable seeds both for hobby users and for professional farmers. I can always find all my vegetable seeds there. The only tiny problem is that they have a very small flower selection, mostly annuals so I had to order my flowers from another online store.

Today my Pšeno seeds arrived, less than 3 working days since they have been shipped. 

I’ve ordered a bunch of lettuce seeds for summer and autumn production. I’ve bought 2 bags of every variety and I’ll use one now and the other later. I’ll be sowing a part of the seeds in containers for seedlings and I’ll sow the rest in the garden in thick rows. The seedlings will be used for heads and thick rows as baby lettuce. I bought every single lettuce type they had. I didn’t buy different varieties of the same type. I rather went with a bunch of different types. This way I can be certain at least a couple of types will grow nicely no matter the weather we’ll have.

I also bought some extra beans for late bean production. I went again with bush beans that like our autumn conditions. Piedmont wonder never fails and always grows wonderfully. I also bought 500gr of fava(broad) beans. I’ll be trying them this year. I’m thinking about growing 200gr in late autumn and the rest in early March. I’m not certain how cold the next winter will be so I’m a bit scared to sow all 500gr and end up with nothing in spring.  

I also bought some Zucchinis that still have time to give fruit and onions and leeks for next year. I’ll sow onions and leeks to containers and transplant them to the garden in late October. This way I’ll have leeks in early spring. 

I have lots of work planned for the next two weeks. I need to clean the garden, harvest the leeks, trim the beets, sow the lettuce and beans, sow the rest of the vegetables to containers and I’m still waiting for the shipment of the perennial and biannual flower seeds which I’ll also need to sow to containers as soon as possible so that I could transplant them to the garden in late fall. This will be a very busy week.