We started sowing indoors!

 

We have been in town for two months trying to find a good assortment of seeds. Shop after Shop told us that they hadn’t been selling well so they have only a limited supply. I had been so excited that the shops placed their seeds out early. When we took a closer look at the display cases, they were selling a larger assortment of flowers, spices and very few vegetables.The shop we purchased the majority of our seeds from last couple of  years, finally told us they are not selling seeds at all this year. It only took them three weeks to find that out for us from their main office.

We jumped in the car and went to the closet largest city and found a plant nursery/shop that had a good choice of seeds. When we were done it rang up at 700 kr, which is about a 100 dollars. I was flabbergasted. We live out in the country. Are vegetable/kitchen gardens that rare here? I got to thinking about it. I have only seen one other family in our immediate area that have a kitchen garden. I know a few more people in town that have small vegetable gardens as well. If I think about it, allotment gardens are more abundant in Sweden, but they are usually in larger cities. I guess we will be ordering from heirloom seed banks earlier than I had planned.

700 kr for seeds, 200 kr in planting soil, 100 kr for 5 spice plants. That is about 160 dollars. Has anyone else notice seed prices are substantially higher? I think they have gone up 40% since last year if not more. Does that mean our food prices will be rising by that much or more this year?

I read on a Swedish blog the other day that it cost 250 kr (almost 40 dollars) to raise one normal size chicken in our local stores for a small hold farmer. I believe that was just for feed. Right now they are not that expensive in the shops? We have to research that for ourselves, but we won’t be buying chickens this summer. We have a neighbor that has a large chicken coop and vegetable/kitchen garden. We are going to visit him and ask question like where he buys seeds and chicken feed. I hope we get some good tips from him.

 

The picture above is the corn for this year.

The picture below is cauliflower, tomatoes and bell pepper that was sown today.You can see my spices in the window sill along with lettuce and one celery plant.