Raspberries!

[city_farmer]

I finally dug the raspberry bed and planted about 10 canes, 5 each of Summit and Heritage. The five canes that I have left over eyed me forlornly from their little peat pot, but, alas, I'd miscalculated how much room I'd have in the bed... so they are still sitting there, unplanted and unloved

Comments

[gardener_cook]

This is enjoyable writing and, clearly, a lovely garden. I enjoyed your comments in an earlier entry about crop diversity, an issue that I suspect we will all hear a lot about in the future. I recently learned that there were fairly extensive seed banks in Kabul and Iran, all trashed now, of course.
Do you do any seed saving and seed selection yourself?

[city_farmer]

What a shame about the seed banks. How did those in Iran come to be trashed? Or did you mean Iraq? Was that part of the impetus for creating the Norwegian seed vault? Maybe not--probably they'd been working on that for quite some time.

Me, I haven't done any seed saving yet. I buy seeds from Territorial, and then use those that I have left over in later plantings...but that's all, really. I'm new at this, so starting things from seeds at all still feels a bit novel. I may get there eventually, but it depends on how much longer I have the time to dedicate to the garden.

What about you?

[gardener_cook]

Oops, sorry, I did mean Iraq. The plans for the Norwegian bank preceeded the loss of the Middle Eastern banks, but certainly these losses illustrated how important it is, and why it needed to be bomb-proof as well as climate-proof.
I buy most of my seeds from Territorial too, and think that for the most part they can do a much better job of keeping strains pure than I can. But over the last few years I've been letting some things self-sow, with good results. I've limited this to nonhybrid tomatoes and salad greens; arugula has been especially successful, and now shows up in stray corners in a cloud of white blooms that looks a little like annual baby's breath.