A few weekends ago my parents and I went shopping for our garden plants. I always look forward to the weekend we go plant shopping and I always take way too long of a shopping list.

We normally only purchase our plants from two local farms, but this year we decided to try out a few other places as well. Since my parents and I like to grow non-GMO crops, we wanted to check out Petitti’s and Whole Foods as well. After that, we went to our normal places, Secor Nursery and Middle Ridge Gardens, where we buy the majority of our plants every year. If you visit the “Our Practices‘ page on Middle Ridge Gardens website, you can see what they do to increase sustainability.

This year we decide to give up on bell peppers and onions, neither seem to grow big enough to validate the room they take up in the garden. I was also put on ‘tomato watch’, because I tend to go a little overboard. The last few years we have come home with 20 tomato plants, but this year I was confined to 15. :(

For tomatoes this year I tried to stick to what I know I will use. We mostly use cherry tomatoes, roma, and several heirlooms. For cherry tomatoes, we bought 1 regular cherry tomato, 2 sungolds, 1 Italian ice, and 1 red pear.

For the bigger tomatoes, we bought 4 roma, 2 golden jubilee, 2 cherokee purple, and 2 mr. stripey.

I use cherry tomatoes in salad and pastas, roma tomatoes to make tomato soup, and heirlooms for pizza’s, sandwiches, and heirloom tomato pie. (which takes 4 hours to make, but it’s so worth it!!)

While I was put on ‘tomato watch’, my dad was put on ‘pepper watch’. Since we gave up on trying to grow bell pepper, he picked out some that we know grow well for us. We bought 4 jalapeños, 2 hot hungarian banana, and 4 sweet banana.

Last year I found a excellent pickling recipe, so I really want to try pickling banana pepper rings and maybe some jalapeños as well.

This year we decided to cut back on the zucchini, mainly because they take up so much room when they grow well, so we only got 6 plants. And some of the random plants we bought were 4 brussels sprouts, 4 spaghetti squash, and a pickling cucumber plant.

Once we start picking cucumbers, I am definitely going to start making pickles again. Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to post the recipe I use. It’s extremely simple and you don’t need any fancy equipment.

For my herb garden this year, we bought basil, purple basil, oregano, dill, chives, thyme, and rosemary. I also bought basil, thyme, and parsley seeds to plant.

And last but not least for plants, green beans. We bought 24 green bean plants this year, we’ve found that you need to buy A LOT of these to actually get enough at once for a meal. I also picked up a few leek plants and seeds.

At Petitti’s we found these seed potatoes, shallots and garlic that all have “GMO Free” markers on them. Potatoes are one of the biggest GMO crops planted, so it was very nice to see these.

Along with potatoes and soy, corn is a largely planted GMO crop. Therefore, I wanted to make sure we planted Organic/Non-GMO corn. I picked up these seeds from Petitti’s as well.

I hope you enjoyed this post! Please feel free to leave a question or comment letting me know if you’d like to see more gardening posts. Subscribe for more posts on Mondays and Thursdays.