The Allure of the Spring Gardening Catalogs

I remember it well.  It was one of those awful days at the end of December.  Sleet changed to rain and back again in a meteorological tug-of-war that seemed to have sapping the post-holiday spirit as its lone purpose.  At mid-day, I trudged out to the mailbox at the end of our driveway, managing to turn an umbrella inside out when a gust of wind caught it as I reached in for whatever the postman had seen fit to leave on such a dreary afternoon.  Back in the house, I plunked the mail down, un-inspected, on the kitchen counter and went off to finish my book. 

The catalogs are all marked up, and
two orders are already in.

I came downstairs an hour later and found my wife at the dining table.  There was the aroma of a freshly-brewed pot of tea.  Across the table’s surface were catalogs and magazines – specifically gardening catalogs and magazines.  One had already been marked up with pages folded over and items circled.  Another was undergoing the same scrutiny.  The third and fourth waited in the wings.

Regardless of what the calendar says, with the arrival of those glossy, color catalogs, the spring gardening season is officially underway.  And, the winter gloom seems to have lifted just a little.

Darcus Daria, a fancy name for
Queen Anne's lave

White Flower Farm featured Daucus ‘Dara’ on its cover.  To me, it’s Queen Anne’s Lace, but if someone wants to call it by some unfamiliar name and label it a ‘hard-to-find’ annual, that’s fine with me.  ‘Dara’ offers delicate flowers ranging in color from white to maroon.  By the vehemence of the circling, I have every reason to believe it will grace our garden this spring and provide a burst of color beginning in July.

Scabiosa is a perfect 'picking' flower

Scabiosa, better known as pincushion flower, has one of the least attractive names ever appended to a beautiful flower.  Johnny’s of Maine features a ‘Pincushion Series’ featuring a mix of color from almost black to creamy apricot and lavender blue.  The wonderful thing about scabiosa is they’re near perfect for cutting.  They can simultaneously grace a garden as well as a dining table.

Betty’s heart never wanders far from the vegetable garden, and I found a dozen pages folded over in Pinetree Seeds’ 2020 catalog.  After several disappointing tries, we had great success with fennel this past year.  I don’t know if ‘Florence’ fennel is the same variety we grew in 2019, but this one promises a one-pound bulb twice the size of its nearest competitor, yet delivering sweet, anise-like flavor.

My love of okra - and its hibiscus-like
flower knows no bounds

She also grows okra because my southern roots demand I have it as part of my diet.  This year, she circled one called ‘Jambalaya’ (the perfect name, in my view) that promises dark green pods in 55 days.  Because it can’t be planted until the soil temperature is close to 80 degrees, getting from seed to fruit in under two months sounds about perfect for New England. 

Ultimately, gardening catalogs are a lifeline between the past and the future.  We’ve chosen to live in a climate where fruit, flowers, and greenery are compressed into five or six months that are equal parts precious and spectacular.  Looked at from an outdoor gardener’s viewpoint, January is the year’s nadir, not its start.  It has been three months since the garden was alive with color, and it will be three months until it again begins to show its promise.  Those catalogs are tangible proof spring is just a few months away.

Seeds of Expectation

Before I get carried away, let me be clear about one thing.  We’re talking about packets of seeds.  Seeds that cost about a buck fifty for a paper packet containing somewhere between a dozen and 500 seeds.  Starbucks would not swap you a tall decaf mocha latte for four packets of seeds, no matter how you declaim their virtues.

Our 2016 seed order arrived last week.
Double-click for a full-screen view.

But virtues they are.  After you consume that latte, all you’ll have to show for it is an empty cup.  Plant those seeds and you can harvest a season’s worth of Parisian carrots or Tom Thumb butterhead lettuce.  And, talk about bargains, the value of that $1.50 seed package multiplies tenfold, or even a hundredfold.  Case in point: Butternut squash is going for $1.59 a pound at my local supermarket this week.  We’ve been eating our 2015 crop of squash since October and still have a dozen specimens in the basement with a current retail value of more than thirty dollars.

I offer that prologue because, last week, two boxes arrived in our mailbox.  They contained our vegetable and flower seeds for the spring of 2016. 

Betty began poring over seed catalogs in late November (their arrival coincided with the last turkey sandwich made from our Thanksgiving dinner).  We receive more than a dozen such catalogs each year; the ones from which she might order is a small subset of what arrives in the mailbox.  What the semifinalists have in common is that their seeds are grown for a northern climate.  “One size fits all” seed companies need not apply.

The mark-up of the seed
catalogs is a wonder to behold

Betty’s markup of these catalogs is a wonder to behold.  There are bold “X” marks through descriptions that, to my untutored eye, look like great choices.  What, exactly, is wrong with Crosby Egyptian beets?  Some varieties are circled once; others, like Maximillian sunflowers, have multiple bold rings.

Looking through the seed packets now on hand (there are more than 50), there are a few surprises.  For example, we will grow five kinds of beets this year.  Why five?  Flavor, days to maturity, and an interest in trying some new introductions without jeopardizing the main crop.

This year will also mark a momentous turn in our gardening practices.  For more than a decade we have been part of a community garden in our town.  We have had a 600 square foot plot, tilled by the town and overspread with composted manure.  All we had to do was fence and plant our little bit of horticultural heaven.

Our new raised beds give us the option
of gardening at home.

We’ll still have that community garden space but, this year, we’ll augment our real estate by ten percent.  This past autumn I built a pair of raised-bed gardens in the sunniest part of our property.  Each is four feet by eight feet for a total of 64 square feet.  The nifty part of the beds is that when I say ‘raised bed’ I mean beds where the soil line is 30 inches above the surrounding ground.  Most raised beds are up about a foot.  Ours can be worked while sitting on the wooden rail around the garden – or even standing.

And the beauty of a raised bed is that there is not a square inch of wasted space.  There are no ‘aisles’ with a raised bed.  We will plant from board to board and start as soon as the soil is warm enough to germinate early spring crops.  We can even artificially warm the soil with row covers.  Perhaps best of all, picking lettuce for a lunch or dinner salad now will mean a quick walk outside rather than a two-mile drive.

Those seeds are a harbinger of the coming season.  The days are lengthening.  Those seeds are tangible proof that winter’s end is within sight. 

Well, at least it’s a glow on the horizon.  

A Sinister Theory About the Source of Bugs in the Garden

Some catalogs feature cute-as-
a-button kids with ringlets
who smile as they eat their
veggies.  This one is from
Territorial Seed Co.

The coffee table in our family room groans under the weight of seed catalogs just now.  We get them by the dozens each year; not just the familiar Burpee’s and Johnny’s of Maine, but special ones chock full of heirloom varieties.  Every catalog is a promise of a wonderful summer rife with perfect, lush vegetables.  Some catalogs even feature photos of adorable children, some with ringlets in their hair, happily eating their veggies.  Life is good.

Betty goes through these catalogs, marking likely candidates for our own garden and other gardens for which she is ordering seeds.  She then compares characteristics of ‘like’ plants, looking for the tell-tale trade-offs among taste, yield, and days to maturity.  In the end, she makes reasoned choices that ensure our garden will be planted with just the right seeds for our needs.

Somewhere out there, I suspect, is an
'alternate' catalog with entries like this...

Why, then, do things go so terribly wrong in our garden every year?  In 2011, it was an infestation of corn borers on top of an army of Mexican bean beetles.  Voles ran amok and nematodes munched voraciously on the roots of our carrots.

And, it isn’t that we stood idly by, watching this destruction.  We keep deer out of our gardens with a vile-smelling spray that, based on its cost, includes gold dust as one of its ingredients.  My fingers turned yellow mushing the egg sacs of various beetles on the bottoms of leaves.  I gamely plucked tomato horn worms from vines; an act of selfless valor that should come with a medal for bravery.

I have a theory about why things go wrong in our gardens.  I cannot prove it, but I suspect that there is a catalog company out there, marketing sheer, unadulterated pestilence.  Its proprietors have a fleet of black trucks (with Jolly Roger flags on the side) that follow the mail man, watching mailboxes, looking for fat packages containing dozens of seed packets awaited by eager gardeners.  These evil businessmen then slit open the packages from the ‘good’ seed companies and substitute their own product (making certain to bill your credit for absurdly high shipping and handling in the process).

... or this.

Come May, you plant the seeds for bush beans, believing that you’ll be harvesting plump, tasty pods into July.  Instead, by some mysterious happenstance, bugs appear almost as soon as the cotyledons have given way to true leaves.  As there are no jumbo jets being chartered from Colorado or Mexico, the eponymous beetles have made their way here via some other means of transport: packets from that sinister seed company.

I can only imagine what their own catalog looks like.  Aphids and whitefly described with the same hyperbolic language used by the ‘good’ guys.  “Brand New! Apocalyptic™ Aphids!” an entry would shout in boldface type.  “Suck the life out of a row of celery in two days, guaranteed!” or “Calamitous® Cabbage Worm turns nearly-mature produce to slime before your eyes!!”

Of course, we hope for the best.  We use ‘best practices” to keep our gardens pest-free yet, somehow, the red spider mites find us.  As for me, this year I’m going to keep an eye on the mailbox, just in case there’s a black truck following it with a skull and crossbones on the side.