Honestly, I also had a chance at some upland rice but with great angst I decided to pass for this year, anyway. According what I read, I would have to start it indoors and transplant out much later. Between my tomatoes and the farm's I've started this year, there is no more room under these lights. I get excited about a crop until I realize, oh yes, it's an early start indoors, and you'll be waiting on weather to decide when they can go out... Ditto amaranth.

I'm super excited about wheats though. Consider the spring wheats - you sow direct into the first thawed ground as early as April (hopefully). Then it's nothing but waiting for actual spring, and your bit of maintenance, weeding, watching, admiring, chasing of critters.... Early season planting is something I'm foolishly optimistic about. Mostly because it seems like less work when I do anything off season.

I ordered a small sample of Sirvinta winter wheat, most seeds to be planted much later in the year. Then a bit of research to see if a spring planting for next year is feasible.

The first year I got a community garden plot, I heard about a master gardener sale of tomato seedlings, 20 miles away. I got there early enough to get a parking space a mile away, joined the line, waited, joined the selection frenzy, and bought maybe 6 tomato plants, probably mostly heirloom. I brought them to the garden and put them aside while I weeded the plot and prepared the soil. Soon, the soil was not yet prepared, but the tomato plants were dead. So I got more tomato plants at the local garden center a mile away (which had a pretty good selection of heirlooms!). I planted them, I got big tomatoes with bird bites and squirrel bites, and decided that I would henceforth plant mostly cherry tomatoes (so if predation happened, it would not matter) and non-red tomatoes (which presumably the critters would not know were ripe). At some point I discovered the tomato forums (GardenWeb before the pop-up ads) and never grew only 6 plants again.