January Seed Catalogs: What to Order (And What to Skip)

There’s a stack of seed catalogs on my kitchen table right now and my wife has asked me twice to move them. I have not moved them. January in Redmond is grey and cold and wet and those catalogs are the only thing that looks like summer right now, so they stay.

The problem is I used to order from them like I was stocking a farm. Six varieties of tomatoes, four kinds of squash, some novelty purple carrots I saw on page 34. My first-year seed order was an embarrassment. Half of it never got planted, a quarter of it was wrong for our climate, and I spent way more than I needed to. Lesson learned the hard way, as is tradition around here.

Start With What You Actually Ate Last Year

This sounds obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me for a while. Before you open a single catalog, write down every vegetable you actually cooked and ate from the garden last season. Not what you harvested. What you ate. There’s a difference, and the gap between those two lists is where money goes to die.

Zucchini is a classic trap. You plant two. You get seventeen. Nobody wants the last fourteen. You know this. Order it anyway if you want, but you’ve been warned.

Match Varieties to the Pacific Northwest, Not the Photo

Seed catalog photography is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That tomato looks incredible. It also needs 85 days of full sun and consistent heat above 75 degrees, which, if you’ve lived here longer than one summer, you already know is not a guarantee.

For us in zone 8b, look for short days-to-maturity on tomatoes and peppers. Under 70 days is your friend. Varieties bred for cool or short seasons actually fruit before our August sun disappears. I learned this after two straight years of green tomatoes in October sitting on my windowsill doing basically nothing. Just sitting there. Being green.

Greens, roots, and brassicas are the opposite situation. We are blessed. Kale in January, lettuce in March, carrots all fall. Order aggressively in those categories. You can actually grow them here without performing miracles.

Don’t Sleep on Seed Swaps

Before you spend anything, check if your local library or community garden does a seed swap. Ours does one every February. I’ve gotten quality open-pollinated vegetable seeds for free, including some genuinely excellent tomato varieties from a guy who clearly takes this more seriously than I do. Which is saying something.

The seeds you actually have to buy, buy them from a reputable supplier that focuses on PNW or cool-climate varieties. There are several good regional seed companies (I’ll let you do that five-second search) and their variety notes are actually written for our conditions instead of some hypothetical sunny utopia.

The Spreadsheet I Refused to Make For Three Years

I’m not proud of this. For three years I planned my garden on vibes. Then I started doing it on graph paper, one square equals one square foot, and suddenly I understood why I kept running out of room. The garden didn’t get bigger. I just finally understood the actual size of it.

Before ordering, sketch your beds. Rough is fine. You don’t need anything fancy, just something that tells you how many row-feet of carrots you can actually fit versus how many you want to order seeds for. Overshooting seed quantities isn’t a budget disaster since seeds are cheap, but it does mean a drawer full of half-used packets that may or may not be viable next spring. I have a lot of those. A real lot.

What I’m Actually Ordering This Year

Here’s my shortlist, for what it’s worth. Sungold tomatoes again because they’re sweet and my daughters eat them like candy straight off the vine, which is the highest possible garden endorsement. A short-season bell pepper I haven’t tried yet. Two types of lettuce for succession sowing starting in March. Snap peas, because they basically grow themselves here and the kids actually help harvest them. The harvest suddenly becomes interesting when you can eat it on the spot.

I’m also finally trying a grow light setup this year for starting peppers indoors in February instead of buying starts. Starts at the nursery add up fast. Last year I spent something like $4.23 a pop for pepper starts at Sky Nursery and bought eight of them, so. Growing from seed won’t go perfectly the first time but the seeds cost almost nothing, so the downside is limited.

And I’m skipping corn again. We don’t have room for corn. I know this. I will not be tempted by the two-page corn spread in the catalog. (I have already looked at the two-page corn spread in the catalog.)

One Rule That Saves Money Every Time

Only order what fits on the list you made before you opened the catalog. Everything else is impulse. Impulse seeds are how I ended up with ground cherries three years running despite the fact that nobody in this house knows what to do with a ground cherry. They’re fine. They’re very fine. We have a lot of them.

Make the list first. Then open the catalog. You can thank me in July. Or, you know, lettuce just say you’ll try.

Photo by Bhaumik Kaji on Unsplash