2024 Little Easy Bean Network - Growing Heirloom Beans Of Today And Tomorrow

[Blue-Jay]

Well @Blue-Jay we're on week #2 of the postal strike. My network beans and others are waiting in a box to go, in my dining room. I heard on the radio today 'they've missed out on 10 million packages being delivered'. Funny wording with that, but needless to say... I'm still waiting for postal services to resume.

Yeah things like this are inconvenient and as painful as they seem to be. That strike will be over eventually. For post customers it's a waiting game.

 

[Zeedman]

For me, the question isn't whether my mail is moving (it is) but whether it gets to me. It's comical (in a dark humor kind of way) how often my neighbors & I meet to exchange mail - despite our complaints to the PO about this. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the ever increasing postal rates (which now go up twice a year) and the declining reliability of the service.

 

[heirloomgal]

As for small size, moist people don't NEED huge amounts of any specific seed. They don't have ROOM to plant 25-50 tomato plants, they have room for maybe five or six. And they aren't planning on planting the same type next year and so on, so saving the balance seems sort of pointless.

This is so true @Pulsegleaner. When I first started gardening I wanted maximum sized packets as some kind of default setting in my mind, I don't know why. I suppose for bush beans and peas that still makes sense for me, but I used to wonder with some seed companies why only 10 -15 seeds for a tomato or pepper? It seemed too little. Then after a few years of saving seeds I realized exactly what you've written here. I have never grown 25 tomato plants of a single variety! And I almost never grow the same variety of anything year to year unless I struggled somewhat with it. Same with most beans. I didn't really need that much seed, and I'd prefer a surplus of my own seed anyway for future plantings. It's always nice to have a little cushion of extra seed in the packet in case you do need to try again, but generally I bet there are thousands of gardeners with seed packets that they never fully used in their storage compartments.