Ordering Garden Seeds

I placed my first garden seed order yesterday with R. H. Shumway.  Their website, www.rhshumway.com  has a garden planning tool that lets you design your garden layout and decide what to plant in each bed. It also gives you planting times and harvesting times, first and last frost dates and a lot of other good information. I chose R H Shumway because they offer some unusual plants. This phacelia flower is a case in point. The catalog description reads:

Surely these are very curiously shaped plants the flowers being borne in one-sided fascicles. Unsurpassed as a honey-producing plant, supplies bees with food. Azure blue flowers with a paler, almost white throat. Height 9-12 inches. Annual.

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A quick search on Bing.com and I found many images; there are over 200 species of phacelia.  One  web site touted the plants use as a green manure plant that is turned under before it starts flowering and praising its root's ability to  loosen heavy soils.  Most sites though, praised it as a bee plant.

R. H. Shumway presents its products as colored drawings rather than photographs (see above). I found hundreds of different pictures of phacelia on the web, most of them looking a lot like campanulas. From the drawing though I think the type I ordered will look like the picture on the left.

Besides being good bee plants, they also make good cut flowers. I like the  adventure of trying new plants. It is one of the reason I like to garden so I am looking forward to growing this "curiously shaped plant" this spring.

My R. H. Shumway order included Bloody Butcher sweet corn, sweet marjoram culinary herb, Brussels sprouts, celeriac, Red Russian kale, parsnips, rainbow colored broom corn, Buck Lunch sugar beets (to feed the cattle), Red Holland shallots, Early Frost green pea, Green Arrow green pea, Mr. Wrinkles pumpkin, Mrs. Wrinkles pumpkin and two collections of red raspberry plants (12 plants). They had a free shipping offer on and order of $50 or more and since this order totaled $51, I received the free shipping.

Now I'm trying to decide to purchase more seeds from the John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, www.kitchengardenseeds.com.  I'd like to grow a variety of everlastings  ( flowers that air dry well) for fall and winter decorating. They also carry flax seeds and a mixture of hard shell gourds that include bird house and apple gourds.  I have it in mind to have a dried flower, ornamental gourd farmer's market booth in the fall. They also had some wonderful sounding lettuce varieties and a couple of French heirloom melons I'd love to try.   I've put my order together and its going to be another $50.00.  I still have a lot of hay to buy this winter and my car needs work (the heater isn't working well and something is wonky with the electrical which causes the horn to short out) , so I am hesitating to place that order.  Can I come up with some new and interesting ways to use those dried flowers, broom corn and gourds that will make folks want to buy them?  Maybe. It's only February 3. I guess I'll sleep on it.