S14 E3: The #1 Way to Save Money on Garden Seeds

Tis the season for fresh garden dreams and pretty seed catalogs. It's easy to get swept away in the excitement of a new season, but before you whip out the credit card and order a pile of new seeds, take a moment to listen to this episode. 

I'm sharing some money-saving advice that will not only help your garden to be more efficient, but also save you some cash in the process.

Podcast Episode Highlights

• Organizing your seeds is going to save you a lot of money
• How a seed inventory will greatly increase your gardening success
• Categorize Your Seeds
• Organize Your Seeds
• Proper Storage of Your Seeds
• Check The Viability of Your Seeds
• Most important tip: Keep it Up!
• My favorite garden varieties for growing

Podcast Feedback

Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!

Podcast Episode Resources and Links Mentioned
Learn more about the Old-Fashioned on Purpose planner here: www.prairieplanner.com

Sign up for my weekly newsletter here: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter

Get your heirloom & open-pollinated seeds here: http://theprairiehomestead.com/seeds

This is my favorite seed storage container: Seed Organizer

Podcast episode with more details on seed starting: What You Didn’t Know About Starting Seeds

Details about cover crops found here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2019/10/garden-cover-crops.html 

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My homesteading tutorials & recipes: www.theprairiehomestead.com

Our Wyoming-raised, grass-finished beef: http://genuinebeefco.com

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Transcript

Jill Winger: 0:00

Hey friends, welcome to Old Fashioned On Purpose, the show where we explore what we have left behind as we have raced towards progress as a society, but not only that, how we can get all the good stuff back. I am your host, Jill Winger, and my family and I have been homesteading out here on the Wyoming prairie since 2008. And in that time, homesteading has changed my life in every way possible. And I'm super passionate about teaching. Old fashioned skills to, well, anybody that will listen. And I firmly believe that we can have the most fulfilling lives right now, not by hiding from modern culture or fully embracing it, but finding that sweet spot in the middle. So today's topic is one I'm really excited about. It's a solo episode today. It's something I've been working on a lot lately, and that is. seeds. Maybe you weren't expecting me to say that. But I am really focused on efficiency lately in my homestead efforts. As my life gets more full, my kids are getting older. There's more things that they're doing. We have the businesses, you know, but I still want to homestead. I'm always going to homestead. So I'm all about figuring out how to keep things flowing as smoothly as I can. And the focus in my efficiency efforts this month would be my seeds because it is January at the time of this recording. It is the time of year when people like me are definitely not outside digging in the garden, but I am dreaming and planning and scheming as to what my upcoming growing season will look like. And a big part of that is ordering seeds. Now, over the years, I've I've tried a lot of different methods, a lot of different techniques for organizing and planning. But there's one thing I've done that has created the most cost savings when it comes to buying seeds. And that is, drumroll please, inventorying your seed stash. It might sound obvious, but it's really easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of the seed catalogs, ordering the varieties, dreaming of what's to come, and you end up overbuying. Now, seeds. really technically aren't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. However, their prices are steadily increasing just like everything else in the world right now. And so as good stewards of our budgets, and also just good stewards in general, I think it's wise to not overbuy. And so today, I want to share some of my best strategies and tips and techniques for inventorying your seeds. I'll share where I love to get seeds that are heirloom and open pollinated because that's really important to me. I'll share some of my favorite varieties. And yeah, we're just going to talk all things seeds. If you want to discuss some of the more technical pieces of starting seeds yourself, because odds are you're probably Either in the thick of doing that now, if you're in a warmer climate or you're getting ready to do that, I'll start my seeds for the greenhouse probably in the next couple of weeks, and then I'll start my outdoor garden seedlings probably in March sometime. So I'm getting close. Go back a few episodes to the show where I talked with Sean from. all about gardening. And he had an incredible amount of information on how to start seeds and do it more efficiently and more effectively because a lot of people struggle with that. So good info there. But today we're going to talk about the seed stash in general. All right, you ready? Let's do this. So first things first, why It's worth it to take the time to do this instead of just pulling out the credit card and going to the seed catalog or the seed website and placing the monster order. Okay, so the first things first, I already alluded to this, organizing and inventorying ahead of time every year, just get into the routine of this, is going to save you a lot of money, right? It's so easy to overbuy this is fresh on my mind because last night I ordered my seeds for the year and before I did that I followed my own advice. I sat down and inventoried, and what I had in my mind that I thought I needed for this coming season, and what I would have purchased if I hadn't inventoried first, was very different than what I actually needed. I had in my mind that I was completely out of cabbage seeds and I was going to order a whole bunch. Well, it turns out I had like a lot, like five ounces of cabbage seeds in my box that was tucked away in a different location. So I would have purchased those for absolutely no reason. Now some of you may be thinking, what's the big deal with overpurchasing? Because. Most of us, including myself, we like to buy ahead, we like to buy in bulk, that's kind of how we roll. Well, you can do that with seeds to a point, but seeds don't last forever. They do have a shelf life. Now, that shelf life really depends. And people always ask, well, how long do seeds last? And the answer is just, it depends. It depends on how you're storing them, the temperature, the amount of moisture the type of seed there's a lot of variables there. Now, seeds are technically designed to last a long time, at least most of them are. We all have heard the stories where regenerative ag communities, where different techniques are applied to a piece of ground. And there will be seeds come up from the seed bank in the soil that are varieties that no one in recent history has even seen before. So seeds are designed to last, but seeds aren't necessarily designed to last when we have them in jars in our. basement and they're exposed to light and warmer temperatures. So it depends on how you're going to store your seeds, but they don't last forever. My point is the older they get, the less usable they will be. So you can buy a pound of cabbage seeds if you want, but odds are that investment will probably not be great because those are going to degrade over time and become less useful. So there's just so many variables there that seeds are one thing I'd prefer not to have giant quantities of. Alright and kind of along with that line, when you're inventorying and you're keeping your seed rotation rolling, you're going to have greater growing success because your germination rates will be higher. One of the biggest frustrations I see gardeners having, whether they're starting seeds indoors or they're doing it out in their garden plot, is they're like, I planted all these beans and 20 percent of them came up. Or I planted this huge flat of peppers and 30 percent of them came up. That in and of itself can put you very behind in your growing season, right? If you're waiting, like let's say peppers, peppers are really slow to germinate just by nature. You're waiting. 10 days, 14 days for those to germinate. By the time you realize that, eh, over half of them aren't going to germinate, now you're two to three weeks behind. Peppers need a long time, and so when you have seeds that you know are viable, that you know are fresh, that you know have a high germination rate, that's going to greatly increase your success in your gardening venture. So it's little things, right? little things, but those little things can make a really big difference in your garden plans for 2024. And like I said, my focus is efficiency and cutting out the fluff, cutting out unnecessary steps. And so You know, I think it took me 20 minutes to inventory my seeds last night, maybe 30, and that was worth it. That was 30 minutes well spent. So, hopefully, you're convinced that this is something to do if you haven't done it already. So let's talk about how to inventory, how to keep things organized, because there's lots of ways to do it, but I have figured out a few little tweaks over the years that have made a big difference for me. Before I go any further though, I did Want to give you a quick recommendation of my favorite seed company because I have a feeling Many of you are wondering that and I figure I would just close that loop in your mind now So you don't have to think about it the rest of the episode And I'll share it again at the end if you don't have a pen and paper at the moment But I love True Leaf Market. If you've been living, or living, listening to this podcast for any length of time, you've heard me mention them before. I've even had some of their founders on the podcast to talk about seeds. They are awesome. They are a small company. They have incredible quality. Their germination rates are fantastic. You're not gonna get old, stale seeds. They are GMO. Air loom, open pollinated at least the majority of their varieties are, and they clearly label each variety accordingly, which means that when a seed is open pollinated, you have the ability to save those seeds. So you technically, if you have your act together, which sometimes I do, sometimes I don't you could buy a pack of tomato seeds and then you save those year after year and you never buy tomato seeds again. So I always, always am picking non GMO, open pollinated, and usually heirloom varieties. And I'll explain a little bit more about heirloom versus not in a minute. But that's really important to me, and that's True Leaf's specialty. They also have really fast shipping. You can get free shipping, I think, over orders of 75 or more. That's when I ordered my stuff last night. I got free shipping. They have cover crops. I have tons of episodes and blog posts about why I love cover crops and they have some excellent selections there. So just good stuff. So true leaf market, if you go to the prairiehomestead. com slash seeds, you can check out what they have to offer. And I'm going to drop that link in these show notes as well. Okay. How to organize. The first thing you want to do is. You know, you got to make a mess before you can kind of clean things up sometimes and so what I suggest is getting all the seeds from every nook and cranny of your home or your garden shed or your garage or whatever and bring them into one place and lay them all out and start making piles, categories, okay? There's a couple different ways you can categorize depending on your goals and what you focus on. A couple options would be season, so you could group your seeds according to when you plant them. You know, there's some seeds that I have that I'm not going to even be bringing out except in early spring or late winter. Like, if I'm going to plant onion seeds, which I don't do a lot because it's a little sketchy, it's hard to get those to grow the way I want, but I only use onion seeds Once and then I don't need them the rest of the year. I have some greens that I plant in my greenhouse when it's super cold. I don't plant them in the summer, so I keep those, you know, kind of off to the sides. I have my other seeds, which I'm planting in the spring. I'm planting another. Round in the summer, I'm planting another round in the fall. So you could organize by season. You could also organize by plant type kind of go into broader categories depending on what you have the most of, what your focus is. Some different types would be the root vegetables, the greens, the brassicas the tomatoes, most homesteaders have a lot of different tomatoes, the herbs, the flowers, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. And then within those, if you want to go into the type sort of categorization, you could also go even further down into variety. So if you're a tomato connoisseur, tomatoes might be a monster category for you. So you'd want to break it up even further. Cherry tomatoes, paste tomatoes, slicing tomatoes, you might break it up by color, you might break it up by heirloom versus hybrid, all sorts of things. For me. I find that the plant type categories work the best. I actually don't keep millions and millions of different plant varieties, generally. I know some homesteaders do, and they get, you know, 20 types of tomatoes a year, and five types of carrots, and three different radishes. I tend to just find a variety that works for me in our short season, because we have a really challenging climate. So I find a variety that works for me, and I just double down on that. Cause, I don't know, I'm in this stage of life where I have so much going on, I'm really just about producing the food that I know we're going to eat the most of. And I'm less about just like garden experimentation. You might be in a different stage of life where experimenting with 20 tomatoes and 16 flowers lights you up, but I'm not there. So for me, I just have pretty minimal varieties in each category. So going the most big umbrella. Buckets works the best. Okay, so my buckets, just in case this is helpful, my buckets that I'm going to organize in would be alliums, like onion and shallot seeds. Now, quick note on that. Often, I just buy onion sets, the little tiny bulbs in the bundles, right? I have tried many times to start onions from seed. I always get them to sprout, but they just don't excel and get really strong. And it just is like kind of a pain. So over the years, I found that a bundle of onion sets is pretty affordable. I can order long storage varieties. I think Dixondale Farms is who I ordered them from the last couple of years. There's lots of different onion suppliers out there. I always get the ones that are going to store well. Sweet onions don't store as nicely. And I want them to last a long time in my basement, so I just get the sets and plant those. Anyway, but I do have a few onion seeds and shallot seeds just for fun. That's my first category. My second would be salad greens, the lettuce, arugula, spinach, and so on. Next category is large leafy greens, like the collards, the chard. Sometimes the mustard goes in there if you're letting those mustard greens get really big. I don't grow a lot of that, but some. Next would be brassicas. That would be broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, etc. Bush beans, cucumbers, carrots, other roots. So I don't have a ton of beets and radishes that I grow, just kind of a handful. So I put those in with parsnips and just keep all the roots, seeds together. Winter squash. Also pumpkins go in there. Summer squash. Winter greens. This would be the mosh, the mizuna, sorrel, and the kale. Like I said, these are what I'm planting basically in my greenhouse during, to grow during the dead of winter. I don't need them any other time of year for the most part. Sometimes I plant kale early, but those go in their own bucket. Herbs, flowers, if you have a lot of flowers you probably want to break that up. I'm, meh, flower grower. Marginal flower grower. I just have a few that I like. And then cover crops. I usually buy my cover crops in giant quantities, like I think I bought 10 pounds of winter rice seed last night from True Leaf. So that doesn't exactly fit in my cute little storage box, but I still have a category of that elsewhere in my basement. So those are my big buckets. You can adjust that according to What you love, what you grow, like I said, if you're a connoisseur of carrots, you're going to need to break it out more, but those are my main buckets, and I could be forgetting some, but those are the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I also do grow potatoes, but because I use seed potatoes. I don't put them here because I'm not organizing my seed potatoes. I just buy them in the spring. Okay, so once I have my buckets, my categories, then I like to document it somehow in writing. That way I can just have a mental tally of what I have and what I don't have. So I use my old fashioned on purpose planner for this. We have seed inventory, seed collection pages in the back sections, and that's what it's for. And we do have planners available still if you'd like to order them. PrairiePlanner. com to get a copy. You can also use Google Sheets or Excel if you're a spreadsheet person. That works great. I would suggest having columns in your spreadsheet. for the seed type, the variety, the quantity and then a place for notes. So you can just say how it performed for you, what you did like, what you didn't like, you know, this termination rate was a disaster, etc., etc. The more notes that you can take, the better, and I think that's one of the hardest things for me. And the other thing that I love about being in being an organized gardener is remembering to take notes and remembering to document and every single year there's always something where I'm like I'm gonna remember this I won't have to write this down and then I come to that following season and I'm like don't remember it and wish I would have written it down so having a place whether it's a google folder whether it's a planner whether it's a note in your phone I don't care what it is just where you're able to jot things down as you go along it's gonna. Make your gardening progress that much more effective because it's really hard to remember things I have found especially when you have lots going on which I think most of you do So I have my planner with my list and my notes and then as far as organizing the seeds themselves I've tried a lot of different things over the years I've tried cardboard boxes and plastic boxes. I've made dividers. I have tried jars and envelopes There's a lot of ways to organize seeds, but the hands down best way that I have used for, I don't know, four or five years now, and I stick with our photo organizer boxes and I'll put a link to those in the show notes. They're the type that a scrapbooker or a just a photo person, I don't know what else to call it, photo person would use if you're organizing a lot of printed photos. They are a big clear box. And then within the clear box are little boxes. that snap open and that you put photos in. And I think the one that I was looking at on Amazon, the one I have like 18 mini boxes to one big box. And as it turns out, those mini boxes are the absolute perfect size for a seed packet. It is almost miraculous. Like it was made for seeds. I think the box is generally run around 30 bucks. I will, like I said, I'll drop the link from Amazon in the show notes, but. They're awesome, and you can get little labels, or put a Sharpie note on each of the boxes for your categories, and pack those babies around, and it saves, keeps them away from mice moisture, etc. They are transparent, so the one thing you'll need to be mindful of is, they still need to be in a dark place. Seeds want to be kept dark, they want to be kept, cool. Well, actually, they would actually not rather be kept dark and cool. They'd rather be kept moist and warm, but that's going to make them sprout. We don't want our seeds to sprout. We don't want our seeds to start to degrade. So to keep them in hibernation, we want them dark and cool. One little note about these boxes. I think one of the biggest benefits is that you can pull the mini boxes out, stick them in your coat pocket or haul them out to the garden and plant a couple of varieties at a time. I did not actually do that last year. And I just grabbed the whole big box and took it out. The reason that can be problematic is because it gives an opportunity for bad things to happen to a larger portion of your seed collection. And that happened to me last year. I forgot I left the big box outside, like it was sealed, or the, I think the lid was open, but all the mini boxes were kind of sealed. They're not like airtight, right? But they were snap shut. And the sprinkler came on during the night. And I didn't realize that when I put the box, you know, Oh, I left it outside. I grabbed it and brought it in the house, stuck it in the basement where it goes. I opened it a few weeks later. Didn't realize that moisture had got in, and I had like half of my seeds sprouting. So do not do that. Take one mini box out at a time. That way if you forget it, it gets wet. You're not gonna lose a large portion of your seed collection. So anyway, that is just a little caveat there. All right, so we have our list in our planner, our spreadsheet. We have our seeds categorized. We have them in some sort of container or box or drawer or whatever. And then I would say if you do have varieties that you have come across in your organization process that you are not sure if they are still good. You've had them a long time. Maybe they were exposed to warmth and you're just like, if these feel sketchy, I would suggest doing a quick viability test. And this is, again, just going to save you heartache later on. A really good example of this would be beans. I find that bean seeds, like bush beans, I've had more issues with those degrading faster than other seeds, even when I don't leave them outside under the sprinkler, just in normal conditions. And a number of years ago, I made the mistake of buying a lot of them in bulk. And then I would plant those seeds that were three or four years old. And I'm like, Oh, my bean germination rate is horrible, like, you know, 20%. And I could have You know, I was like, what do I, what is it? What, what is happening? And I realized later, well, the seeds were old. I didn't realize that at the time. So, a viability test is a really simple way just to check your seeds. And so, the way you can do this, and again, you don't need to do it for everything in your stash, just for the ones you're uncertain about. Grab your seeds. And a paper towel. We're going to get the paper towel pretty damp, and then put the seeds in a grid pattern in the paper towel. I like to shoot for 10, because it makes it really easy to figure out percentages, right? You could also do 20, but you don't want to waste a ton of seeds, so 10's a great number. Put the seeds separate, don't just wad them up in the paper towel, make sure that they're separated out on the wet paper towel, fold it over, and then roll it up. Now put the paper towel in a Ziploc baggie to prevent it from drying out. You want to keep it moist the whole time. And then put the baggie in a warm place. It doesn't have to be bright, seeds don't need light to germinate, they just need light later. So it can be a warm, dark place, and temperature is important because seeds Don't germinate as effectively when they are in cool temperatures, and then just tuck that away. And within, well, it kind of depends on the seed itself, right? It can take anywhere from three days to two weeks for seeds to germinate depending on the seed. A bean seed, I'd say you're probably going to see something happening, little tails coming out of the bean within four to five days. If you're doing carrots, it's going to be a lot longer. Sometimes that's 10 to 14 days, but just start watching. And then once you're kind of past that window where it should be germinating, count how many germinated and you can figure out your percentages. So if five of the 10 germinated, you had a 50 percent germination rate. If two of the 10 germinated, you had a 20 percent germination rate and so on. That's going to give you a good ballpark of what to expect when you get outside in a garden. Now, if you do have some seeds that aren't as viable as you like. You can still use them in the garden. I just would plant them potentially a little more densely just to make up for that, the chance that you're probably going to have a higher rate of failure, but just that little step of the viability, again, it's not absolutely necessary, just like inventorying isn't absolutely necessary, but it's going to save you time and headache in the long run. And when we're working to be more efficient, that's, That's a pretty big deal, right? Okay, so then my last step of the process is the hardest one. Just don't forget to keep up on this as you go through your season. I find that these early months, well at least it's early for me, some of you are probably already knee deep in your gardens if you live in Texas or the South. But for me, these early months, it's really easy to start off with grand intentions. I order all the seeds, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try that, I'm going to You know, I have all these resolutions to stay on top of things, and every year, it never quite works out like I think. I think that's just a lesson in life in general. But I just want to make sure that I am keeping up on my note taking as we go through the year, whether that's in my Google Sheet or it's in my planner. Those little notes, they don't have to be full sentences. They just can be brief thoughts or phrases go a really long way. So make sure you're tracking as you remove seeds from your inventory, as you add them to your inventory, if you find problems, if you find pest issues with certain varieties, if germination rate's bad, if you love the plant, if you hate the plant, write it down. Right. And that is my. little four step method for seed inventorying. So I hope that was helpful. Also I wanted to share a quick list, let me pull it up, of my favorite seed varieties because I find that this is always fun just to hear other gardeners favorites, right? These are primarily heirlooms. I think there's a couple in here that aren't, they are all GMO free. They are all open pollinated other than the potatoes. That's a little different. Heirloom is just, I think it's 50 years or older, classifies something as an heirloom. And I have a couple on here that are a little more modern, like they were created in the seventies. So it doesn't bother me. Right. It doesn't have to be, there's something magic about 50 years, but yeah, anyway, so my favorite. Open pollinated, heirloom ish seeds and varieties to grow. When it comes to tomatoes, I love San Marzano's. I know the tomato world is a big one and there's so much to choose from. We're not huge, huge eaters of just tons of slicing tomatoes or tons of cherry tomatoes. I use those sparingly. So the thing we do love is tomato sauce, tomato paste. I like to can as much as possible because I, I haven't bought home or sorry, I haven't bought store bought tomato products in a very long time. So San Marzano's are a paste tomato with a lot of flavor and the difference between a paste tomato and a slicer is that the paste ones have a lot less water content. You can make sauce out of a slicer. You're just going to boil it down a lot longer. It's going to take more time. Again, efficiency, right? The San Marzanos are classic for sauce and they're meatier and drier, not in a bad way, in a good way, and just makes it a lot more efficient. Watermelon is something I have more recently played with because Wyoming, right, we were not exactly watermelon territory, but there's a variety called Blacktail Mountain watermelon. That's a super short season. It's a small guy. It's probably. The size of a volleyball or smaller and it does have seeds, which it doesn't bother me, but they're awesome. They grow quickly. I can grow them in the greenhouse or outdoors. Greenhouse is better. But they taste really good and it's just fun to have watermelon in Wyoming. It's a novelty. For pumpkins, I like the sugar pie variety. They're smaller, but their flavor is awesome. The flesh is dense and rich. For spinach, I like Bloomsdale Longstanding. Spinach is tricky because it bolts quickly, and I've learned that it's pretty much a fool's errand to try to grow spinach in the summer. So spinach for me is an early spring or a fall winter crop, and that will help you get more bang for your buck. So, Bloomsdale Longstanding is my favorite I will say, buyer beware, there's a variety called New Zealand and they marketed it, I don't remember where I bought it, just kind of a typical seed company. I don't even know if Truleaf has it, but it's description said it was like, the best for not bolting. And that sucker bolted faster than any variety of spinach I've ever grown. Like it was barely out of the ground and it was bolting. So don't get those. Anyway. For beets, I like Detroit Golden Beets, and I think they have a really good flavor. I also like they don't stain my whole kitchen when I'm using them or cutting them up. I don't do a ton of beets. My family likes them a few times a year and then they're like meh, but a couple rows will usually do us for lettuce I like butter crunch. It's the the texture of the leaves is just fantastic The flavor is amazing again I usually grow that more in the spring in the fall versus the summer for onions a good red storage onion I got it from Dixondale Farms is Red Zeppelin. There's also one called Blush and Copra. I think I tried all three of those last year, was really happy with them. Onions are cool because you can really if you read the descriptions, figure out the long season, the short season, the different flavors the different storage ability. So I think onions are really fun to grow. For potatoes, I'm pretty boring. I actually just like to grow Yukon golds. And I don't buy my potatoes, at least not in recent years. I don't buy them from a official seed potato place. I actually just buy organic potatoes from the grocery store. I started doing that in 2020 when you could not get seed potatoes anywhere. And I just told Christian, I'm like, well, it's now or never just go to the or the health food store, whatever the non normal grocery store and get organic potatoes. We cut them up, planted them and they worked great. Like It was fine. And they're way cheaper than buying seed potatoes. You know, the downfall is you don't get the fancy varieties. I found the fancy varieties never quite gave me to yield as much as the workhorse varieties. And so Yukon Golds are easy. Like I said, if you're going to get them at the grocery store, get them organic, otherwise they have been sprayed with a compound that keeps them from sprouting. Which is the kiss of death when you're trying to grow potatoes. That works. Okay. Carrots. I like tender sweet. Again, I've tried a lot of varieties of purple and the orange and the red and they're fun. And I just am kind of going with the standbys and tender sweet have worked really good for us. And then for bush beans, I like the contenders or the providers. They are shorter season. They're just high yield, super easy and haven't had a lot of issues with those. So that. Is my list of favorites. Everyone has different favorites. I love to hear. what people find, you know, I'm always always changing, right? I do experiment a little bit every year. But I found when I first started homesteading, I wanted to try five different varieties of everything and it just got messy and convoluted. So now I'm kind of back in my stuck and not stuck in my ways. But I found things I love and I'm happy to just stick with it and experiment with a few different varieties every year. Again, TruLeaf Market is my favorite place to get the seeds. The prairiehomestead. com slash seeds will take you right to their online store. It's really easy to navigate, good shopping, free shipping over 75 good company. Just good company all the way around. So anyway, that is my encouragement for you. If you haven't started your gardening yet, You're like me, you're in the Arctic, and you're still sitting by the fire and planning. Just spend a little time getting ready for this year. Maybe not just in the garden, maybe in other places in your homestead. How can you use these quiet, dark evenings to prepare and set yourself up for success for a more well thought out and efficient homesteading season in 2024? So, that's it, friends. That's all I got for you today. I hope that was useful. If you like this sort of information, this is what I send out every week in my newsletter. It comes on Wednesdays, and I usually do a recipe, a framework, a how to, and usually some sort of more information. Deep thought piece each month and you can sign up for free over at the prairie homestead. com slash letter. We'll drop that down in the show notes. This episode actually was an email before it became a podcast episode. So I don't always publish. All my newsletters into podcasts or turn all my podcasts into newsletters, but this one worked well for both. So anyway, you want to get it first if you want to see it before everybody else, or you want to just have a written version of some of this stuff. Because sometimes I like to listen to things, but I really absorb it the best when I see it with my eyeballs. Go join the list and you'll get a little note from me every Wednesday. All right, friends, that's it. Have a wonderful rest of your day. And thanks for listening to the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast.