I know, I know I have said it before and I will say it again, I love when my Heritage Harvest Seed Catalog comes in and the new 2013 has arrived! They are having their 10th year, and the work they have put into growing the plants and their business is amazing!

I adore sitting reading this catalog with a highlighter in hand, its just plain fun.. if you like heritage seed, no GMO, no hybred and to me the best example of having seed available that was tailored to certain area’s of canada, this is the one!..

While I strongly recommend looking for and joining your local free cycle plant swap, as well as looking and going to your local seed savers events but you are still not going to find the selection of the more rare locally that you will with Heritage Harvest Seed.

I know that I am pretty much talking to folks that already do this but do check out those bigger seed catalogs and spend a little time googling to see who owns them, so many of the smaller ones have been bought out by the bigger companies its amazing really, its like so many of the larger organic brands that now belong to the major companys.

As the ground freeze’s and the winter is truly coming down on the farm at this time, I can safely and slowly turn my eye and mind to the garden of next year, somehow this fall, I just found the thought of the coming garden season overwhelming.

Its offical, 2012 was the worst garden year we have had on the farm since moving here.. and there are so many reason’s why, here are just a few..

• while we rocked at getting the early garden in and it did well as did a number of the fall garden, the main garden itself was at its poorest.
• Dry and super hot, lack of water, lack of rain to collect water, broken back well, which meant no access to the big back well, in fact had to order in a tank of water for the shallow well to get us though the late summer/fall, and the extra water was needed for the critters more so then the garden. (only the hugelculture did well in this way)
• Gone for the main month of planting season
• Hurt myself over the summer and this slowed me down in a number of ways.
• No stay-work vacation for my DH this year, he had his holiday off the farm and that was wonderful as he needed it and I am so glad he had family time but boy did this show that I didn’t have him home on the farm this year.
• Brandy, ok I know that it sounds lame but its the truth, I got my wonderful horse late summer and spent a goodly amount of time for the first two months working with her twice a day, throw in the pigs, the cows etc and time that in past years would have gone into the garden, went instead into critter time.
• Self-Pity Party 😛 – No really, I didn’t have the water to keep the garden going and it was just depressing to see so many plants struggling and failing and not being able to do anything about it, this kept in working around parts of the garden that did well and kept me turning a blind eye on parts of the garden that were failing because I had little to no way to fix it

So I laid it out there, tell me how was your garden year this year? Did you have a good one, a ok one, or a bad one like me? Regardlesss of what happened in your garden, what was the top three reason’s it was awesome or top three reason’s it didn’t work this year? If you had a bad year, are you finally starting to turn your mind towards the future of what next year will bring?