It started as a trickle and soon became a flash flood that won’t dry up until the leeks and potatoes arrive.

My seed orders have been going out since early March, and the first came back before a week had passed. The entire month has been like surprise Christmases popping up here and there. You never know what might be coming when or what special “gift” has been tucked in among your expected seed packets.

Or, if you’re like me, you forget you ordered a particular item, only to be impressed by your own self when you see what great things you have planned.

This year looks to be a doozy.

Not only do I have my mixed assortment of potatoes – Dark Red Norland, Onaway and Purple Viking for the tried and true, French Fingerling and German Butterball for the something new – from Fedco in Waterville, but I have onions and leeks – lots and lots of onions and leeks – coming from Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Albion. Fedco’s been doing potatoes for years, but Johnny’s hasn’t offered bunches of onion and leek plants before. So I thought I’d try a collection. Or two. I scaled back my Walla Walla obsession (only five bunches this year) to try Collection B, which has the Ailsa Craig Exhibition, Red Burgermaster and Super Star varieties. Onion bunches, by the way, are 60-75 plants each. I kept the leeks to a minimum with only three bunches of 50.

Somehow, it seemed like enough.

From Pinetree Garden Seeds in New Gloucester I’ve got strawberries, blueberries and raspberries coming. This is my I-want-to-dig-a-new-bed-and-cart-compost collection. After they’re in, they’ll become the I-love-hauling-water-several-hundred-feet collection, but I’m trying not to go there. Only positive thinking of all those juicy berries growing all summer long shall ever enter my mind, at least until it’s 85 degrees and humid enough to steam a hot dog.

And now would be a good time to give the birds fair warning to keep their beaks off my berries, or it’s the annoying bird netting for them. Actually, it’s probably more annoying for me since I always seem to get in a tangle and trip. But I’ll do it, I swear I will, if they start hanging out and making threatening darts toward my fruit plants.

On the off chance that I may have some spare time, I decided I really wanted to start a slew of my own plants this year, a decision abetted by the discovery of these neat miniature greenhouses in the Burpee catalog. The base has a heating element to keep the roots at an even 70-75 degrees, and the clear plastic dome keeps the moisture even. At $25.95 it even was affordable.

Visions of seedlings began dancing in my head.

Armed with peat pots and bags of seed-starting mix, I plan to start a few perennials, including soapwort, speedwell, rudbeckia, lavender, delphinium, dianthus and even a sedum.

If they do well, I may even try a couple of batches.

In the other miniature greenhouse (yes, I bought two), I’ll start vegetables, including some heirloom tomatoes that I’ve been salivating over.

From Nichols Garden Nursery in Oregon, I got a packet of red currant tomatoes, a variety I’ve longed to try. I’ll only need a couple of these plants to get enough fruit to keep me happy. If I’m very, very lucky, one of the plants will be a yellow variety, a strain that shows up 10 percent of the time in this particular selection.

Polish Linguisa, another Nichols offering, is an heirloom from the late 1800s that was brought from Poland to New York. The tomatoes are sausage-shaped (no, I can’t imagine it either), and the plants are reportedly vigorous producers. And, “it tastes so good you may not care to add salt.”

That pretty much won me over.

As if those weren’t enough to experiment with, I got two more varieties from Shepherd’s Garden Seeds in Connecticut.

One tomato, Costoluto Genovese, I have grown before with good results. This Italian heirloom can produce huge fruits, with a multitude of deep lobes that give it its unique appearance. The flavor is intense, the color a vibrant red.

My trial variety from Shepherd’s is a French heirloom that is ripe when it is a deep orange.

I was reeled in on Jaune Flammee because it is said to have “huge, even explosive flavor.” The added bonus is that the fruits come in clusters of eight to 12 and are near the size of a jumbo egg.

But topping all those considerable charms is the number of days it allegedly takes for this one to produce: 60 days.

Just two months.

Two little, bitty months and I could have ripe tomatoes.

Did I mention that I had ordered some Wall O’ Waters this year, too? Those are the neat gadgets that you fill with water and set over your sensitive seedlings so you can extend your growing season into, say, April.

Do you think that might mean I could, maybe, have tomatoes in June?

OK, I won’t push it.

How about the Fourth of July?

Sources for seeds

Fedco Seeds, P.O. Box 520, Waterville, Maine 04903.

Johnny’s Selected Seeds, 184 Foss Hill Road, RR 1 Box 2580, Albion, Maine 04910; telephone 207-437-4301; www.johnnyseeds.com.

Pinetree Garden Seeds, Box 300, New Gloucester, Maine 04260; telephone 207-926-3400; www.superseeds.com.

Burpee, W. Atlee Burpee & Co., 300 Park Ave., Warminster, Pa. 18991; telephone 1-800-888-1447; www.burpee.com.

Nichols Garden Nursery, 1190 Old Salem Road NE, Albany, Ore. 97321; telephone 541-928-9280; www.nicholsgardennursery.com.

Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, 30 Irene St., Torrington, Conn. 06790; telephone 860-482-3638; www.shepherdseeds.com.

Janine Pineo is a NEWS systems editor. Her e-mail address is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.