Here at the House of the Lifted Lorax, we don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day with flowers and candy. We celebrate it with potting soil and seed packets.

Feb. 14 falls two months and a day ahead of the last frost date for our zone, which makes it an ideal time to start seeds indoors. We buy our seeds from Seed Savers Exchange, which is a great organization dedicated to preserving heirloom varieties of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, flowers and more.

Tomatoes are our favorite crop. You can buy a decent cucumber at the grocery store, and you can find passable squash, peppers, and eggplant at the farmer’s market, but nothing can stand in for a homegrown tomato, fresh from the vine … so regardless of what else we may or may not put in the garden, we always grow tomatoes.

Most years, I get a little carried away, trying new varieties, but this year, I exercised some restraint and confined myself to four varieties: two kinds of cherry tomatoes (Risentraube and Mexico Midget); Silvery Fir Tree (an early slicer with pretty foliage); and my all-time favorite, Black from Tula, which is a Russian heirloom that produces unspeakably ugly but indescribably delicious fruit.

I haven’t grown the first three varieties in the past, but I’ve yet to see a cherry tomato that wouldn’t thrive in all conditions, and Silvery Fir Tree just looked too beautiful to pass up, so we’ll see how they do.

There are two secrets to great tomatoes:

1. Horse manure. Find a nice person with horses and ask if you can scoop stalls in exchange for manure. A mix of manure, urine-soaked sawdust, and spoiled hay is the world’s finest compost starter, as the nitrogen-to-carbon ratio is as close to ideal as you can get without a chemistry lab. I’ve grown tomatoes the size of softballs, on vines that looked like kudzu, with the help of horse compost.

2. Deep holes. Use a posthole digger to dig down two to three feet. Most tomatoes’ roots will grow down until they hit hardpan, and then they start to spread out sideways. In hot, dry weather, the top layer of soil dries out very quickly, and the roots dry with it. If you dig a posthole to a depth of about one foot below hardpan, your tomatoes’ roots will be able to reach the moist dirt that lies below instead of spreading out to bake in the sun.

I’ll have more on the tomatoes as they progress, but at the moment, the seeds are tucked quietly into moistened potting medium in a seed-starting flat. As soon as I finish converting our potting table to a temporary cold frame, I’ll move them outdoors.

Emily