Well, it’s here – the most dangerous season of the year. Spring, you wonder? Nope, it’s that season in late winter before spring returns; seed catalog season is here. Like geese, the catalogs start to show up on a seasonal schedule, except their schedule seems connected to boredom and cabin fever. Wonder when your seed catalog will arrive? Check the weather forecast for a blizzard and then plan to check the mailbox in a couple of days. We received our second catalog this week, and a handy planting calendar. There’s so much to dream of – dinners of heirloom tomatoes; hot, sweet, speckled, ghost, reaper and even chocolate peppers; an international array of kale from Russia, Portugal, England, United States, even a dinosaur kale. It looks tasty; too bad the dinosaurs aren’t around it try it. And then there’s all the cucumbers, squash, and lettuce. It’s enough to keep me awake all night planning the perfect garden and all the exotic meals I’ll make this summer. I have to resist. Sometimes a couple of glasses of wine are needed to help me fall asleep… . However distracting, I love seed catalogs because they offer ideas that I might never have without color photos to motivate me and, maybe most of all, they represent hope and opportunity. The fantasy that forms while gazing at the perfect foods remind me that it’s never too late to try, that there’s another opportunity to do better right around the corner. Farmers are resilient for a reason. Our faith in the perseverance and success of tiny seeds grows optimism and hope along with food.
Nonsense, you think? It’s true, seeds generate hope and hope plants gardens. Really. About three years ago, my husband got hold of the seed catalogs first, unknown to me. We generally grow our own plants from seeds so order them early. Time went by and I was more than a little shocked to find that he had planted 25, yep, 25 varieties of tomatoes. I was speechless for a bit but finally asked what he was thinking. I might have sounded a little murderous but that was just the shock. His response was that we could try them all and see what we liked best. He was confident we’d find the perfect tomatoes for us. We planted them all, big, little, red, pink, yellow, cherry, plum, and mystery plants. At the end of the summer, we had so many tomatoes it was overwhelming. And yes, they did taste, look, and ripen differently. I made the decision to choose three varieties based on my preferences in taste, size, and purpose. Since I make a lot of marinara sauce and we eat more cooked tomatoes than raw, my choices were Abe Lincoln (an heirloom), JetStar (a 1960’s variety), and San Marzano (an Italian tomato hailed as one of the world’s best paste tomatoes). And to be fair, without the taste-testing marathon, I wouldn’t have found my perfect mix of tomatoes.
While I confess to spending inordinate amounts of time browsing the seed catalogs, my husband’s planting fantasies are on another level altogether. He loves fruit trees, apples in particular, and Stark Brothers long ago motivated him to create his own living catalog of apple trees. There are about 2,500 varieties of apple trees growing in the United States Curious, I asked him how many varieties we now have and his response was, “about 40 or 50.” For the past few years, he’s been learning to graft trees. Grafting is when you cut a small limb from one variety of tree and reattach it to a different tree. This is a somewhat complicated process, and believe it or not, there’s specialty catalogs for those cuttings and tree roots as well. The advantage of this is that one can grow lots of different apples on some sturdy roots in your local environment. We now have Sheepshead apples, grown for their unusual name; Melrose apples, an Ohio native; Early (Yellow) Transparent apples, an immigrant from Russia, and so, so many more delicious apples to try out. Browsing the catalog for apples is a commitment to time and faith as well. Apples don’t produce immediately, they need continued care and a firm belief in a future harvest.
Are seed catalogs dangerous? Absolutely! They're a great way to skinny up your bank account. Having said that, I'm ok with the risk. The real benefit of the seed catalogs, in my opinion, is that they convince us that investing time and money in the future is a good investment, the hope for something better to come. So, bring on the seed catalogs. Let’s dream of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. Let’s imagine those warm, sunny days with our creations growing around us!
