Skip to main content

Give Me A Seed Catalog On A Frosty Winter Evening

Like much of the eastern United States, Wynfield Creek Homestead has seen colder than usual temperatures this January, with lows on a couple of nights dropping into the unheard-of-in-these-parts single digits. We've also had our share of precipitation this month, but have been fortunate NOT to have the two at the same time... until today. Now, to be fair, the inch or two of "wintry mix" we are likely to get over the next few hours is nothing compared to the foot or two some areas of the country have endured this winter. Still, I've been saving up a particular item for an evening such as this, and, no, it's not a fifth of Wild Turkey -- although that doesn't sound bad, either. 

If your household is anything like mine and you do a lot of your Christmas shopping online and via catalog, you probably received an astounding number of catalogs between October 1st and December 1st. There were days in the early part of November when the mailbox was stuffed with a half-dozen each day. By Thanksgiving, however, that flow had dried to a trickle and had stopped entirely by mid-December. Then, right before Christmas, a new trickle started, the annual run of seed catalogs.

Now, to be honest, seed catalogs, like the start of spring training and the first robin, don't mean quite as much to me now as they did when I lived on the frozen tundra of northwest Ohio. In that dark and desolate land of chest-high snow drifts, sub-freezing daily highs and chill winds blowing across miles of empty farmland, the brightly colored catalogs with their pictures of bounteous crops and dazzling flowers were a sort of mini-vacation, a chance to leave the cold and snow behind for a few hours and lose oneself in the promise of spring and the smell of freshly-turned earth. Still, even in a place where "winter" lasts a couple of weeks and rarely involves more than a sprinkle of freezing rain or an inch of wet snow, there is a primal pull toward the promise of fresh vegetables growing tall and green under a Carolina blue sky. And that's why I save my seed catalogs for an evening such as this.

As far as the catalogs themselves go, everyone has a favorite among the dozens out there and everyone has an opinion on why that one is the best. For reasons that I cannot entirely recall, my catalogs of choice when I lived in Ohio were Johnny's Selected Seeds and Park Seed. I still order from Johnny's, which is based in Maine, but, strangely, no longer order from Park, which is based in South Carolina. In the place of Park I have added Landreth's, which bills itself as the oldest seed company in America, as my second favorite. These catalogs take entirely different approaches and have entirely different target markets. Johnny's targets the larger-scale home gardener and the small-to-midsize "professional" grower; the kinds of people you might see hawking their wares at a Farmers' Market. Their catalog is more technical in presentation, with detailed information on yields and productivity along with presentation, marketing and selling tips. Landreth's catalog is a work of art, with wonderful illustrations that are clearly designed to appeal to the recreational gardener. One thing I particularly like about Landreth's is that it offers an entire section devoted to container gardening, including several varieties cultivated specifically for this purpose. It also offers a number of "heritage" seeds for traditional colonial-era plants.

 I also occasionally order from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds. Located in Mansfield, Missouri this family-owned company is relatively new to the game, having printed their first catalog in 1998. I like their commitment to homestead values and their "village" concept. 

 Most recently, I have been entranced by the Territorial Seed Company catalog. I ordered a single pack of specialty seeds from them last year over the internet and just received their full catalog for the first time. It is the first catalog I have run across that offers a selection of hops, which I suppose has to do with them being located in Oregon. 

 Whichever seed company is your particular favorite, I hope you enjoy some frosty down time perusing their catalog and making your selections for the coming year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FRIDAY MATINEE: Midnight Mass (🍺🍺🍺🍺)

I held off writing this review until I had seen all seven episodes of the new Netflix limited series “Midnight Mass.” I’ve been burned in the past by shows that start out well and then devolve into silliness as they progress. While “Mass" doesn’t completely stick the landing, I think even the East German judge would give it a solid 9. Taken as a whole, I think it is as effective a piece of horror as the combined “It” movies from a few years ago, and right on par with “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.”  The story revolves around a man returning to his childhood island home after a prison stay for a drunk driving accident that killed a teen girl. Coincidentally, it is the same day the island’s beloved elderly priest, Monsignor Pruitt is supposed to return from a trip to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, the priest has taken ill and is being treated on the mainland. A temporary priest arrives to take his place.  The story takes a little while to get going, and anyone who’s familiar with t...
3 comments
Read more

You Label Me, I'll Label You

Sometime around 1970, my parents acquired a "high tech" device known as a Label-It. Manufactured by the DYMO Corporation, the Label-It was an embossing tape printing system that produced a sticky-backed plastic strip onto which the user could custom-print words or short phrases; or for that matter I suppose all the great works of literature, given enough patience and an unlimited supply of tape. The Label-It was gun-shaped with a horizontal alpha-numeric wheel on top. You loaded a spool of plastic tape into the back and fed it through the embossing head. By arranging the wheel so that the desired number or letter was over the tape and pulling the "trigger," the head forced the tape against the raised character and, due the physical properties of the plastic, a white image of the character was transferred to the tape. When the entire word was finished, you hit the "cut" button and removed the label. It was fairly primitive by modern standards, but it was ...
Post a Comment
Read more

FIELD NOTES: Trust in authority, but verify

At some point in our lives, most of us have been either the victim or the perpetrator of a prank phone call. Most of these calls are harmless. Many are legitimately funny; some are mean-spirited, and a select few are dangerous. In college, some of my buddies and I would call a random number pretending to be from a fictitious sports radio station. We would ask a nonsensical question to (supposedly) win a prize. One question I specifically recall was, “Name  the three teams in this year’s Super Bowl.” The “contestant,” likely a teen girl by the sound of her voice, got the first two teams right but, not surprisingly, struggled with the third one.  Ultimately, she guessed Pittsburgh, which was “wrong,” but actually a pretty savvy answer given that the Steelers were a perpetual Super Bowl contender in those days.  Although those calls don’t represent my finest hour, I think even the “victims,” if they ever even realized they’d been pranked, would admit it was pretty innocuous....
Post a Comment
Read more