Writing about seed saving in the September volume of Weekend Homesteader tempted me to save a lot more seeds than I usually do.  I ended up with too many for next year's garden, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite varieties with one lucky reader.  All of the seeds included are easy to save, so if you enjoy them, you can keep the variety going in your garden indefinitely.  Here are the vegetables I'll include in my starter pack:

• Masai Beans --- Prolific, stringless, delicious, French-style bush beans.  We won't plant any other kind of green bean.
  
• Martino's Roma Tomato --- Although we plant a few other types of tomatoes for fresh eating, this is our big producer.  It's a semi-determinate plant, so you get masses of tomatoes all at once, which is perfect for preserving.  The fruit dry well and cook into sauces perfectly.  Martino's Roma is somewhat resistant to various blights.
  
• Tangerine Pimiento Sweet Pepper --- This pepper is perfect for the lazy gardener who doesn't want to start peppers inside before the frost.  Direct-seeded, my plants still put out plenty of ripe peppers before the frost since the fruits are small and bulk up fast.
• Mexican Sour Gherkin --- If you live in a warm, humid climate, it's tough to grow cucumbers organically, but Mexican Sour Gherkins resist all of the usual diseases.  They're slower to fruit than cucumbers and the fruits are tiny, so it's a bit like picking berries to harvest them, but Mark thinks they have a superior taste to cucumbers.  Mexican Sour Gherkins would be an especially good choice for the stealth urban homesteader since the vines are beautiful and don't look much like vegetables.
  
• Sugar Baby Watermelon --- The small size of these watermelons means that Mark and I can often eat a fruit in one sitting.  Having lots of small watermelons in your garden rather than one or two big ones means you lose less if you pick them at the wrong time (which is the toughest part of growing watermelons.)  And unlike other melons (which succumb to molds and mildews), my Sugar Baby Watermelons shrug off our humid summers.
  

To be entered in the giveway, just promote one of my ebooks in any way you choose.  I'm most in need of a review for the October volume of Weekend Homesteader, but you can post a link on Facebook or your blog, email your friends, tell your Mom, or do whatever suits your fancy.  No need to buy the ebooks to enter --- just email me and I'll gladly send you a free pdf copy of whichever ebook(s) you choose.

Leave a comment on this post by midnight on Sunday, October 2, to let me know you've entered, and I'll pick one of you at random on Monday morning to win the seed package.  Thanks in advance for helping spread the word about my newest ebook!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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