Spring Fiction

This is not actually a post from JNJ, but EJ instead.  I see I was mentioned way back in the second post of this blog in July, so perhaps I can be an honorary contributor.  It sure beats grading.

Just a few weeks after I finally planted our garlic, the first seed catalog arrived in the mail, signaling the start of next year's gardening season.  J has been teasing me for reading it in bed before going to sleep at night, but what's not to like?  It's the Fedco Seeds catalog.  While not exactly literature, it does make for more entertaining reading than most seed catalogs.  And, as reading-about-gardening, it fills in the middle part of the Venn diagram for this blog.

Why should you, literate gardener, get a copy of this catalog?  Simply put, because it has a huge variety of interesting things to grow, written about in an interesting way.  The catalog is much less slick than the average seed catalog (e.g. Burpee) - it's black and white, on low-grade paper, with no photos, just line drawings.  At 138 pages of 10-point type, it packs in a lot of content.  But the best thing about this catalog is the tell-it-like-it-is way the plants are described.  Every entry gives a clear sense not only of how long things take to mature, but what they actually taste like (to the extent that that can be captured in words), and what their weaknesses are.  This, for me, brings back a feeling of small-town ways of doing business that I don't see around as much as I would like any more.  It's about knowing your product, and trusting your customers enough to give them the information, both positive and negative, that will let them make a good decision about what to buy.

For example, take the Early Girl tomato, a popular early hybrid.  As to flavor, Burpee says only "Bright red and meaty with a lot of flavor and aroma", but from Fedco, you get this: 

Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post claims, “The true tomatohead disdains the Early Girl…not great eating, your Early Girl, but first, yes.” Accordingly, this girl is well-loved by commercial growers who need heavy yields of good-looking slicing tomatoes early in the season when the market commands high prices. It was the highest yielder among 12 cultivars in a 2006 New Jersey trial, averaging 9.7 lb. per plant. Gerhart notwithstanding, Early Girl delivers fairly good flavor for such an early tomato—sweet, meaty with a hint of tartness. The slightly flattened bright crimson globes average 4-6 oz. with firm texture, blemish-resistant skin and a long production period.

Over and over again in the catalog, there's this great sense of what a particular variety is really like, from tomatoes that have a "smoky flavor like a good single malt scotch" but which "disintegrate like a hunk of road-kill" if they get too ripe (Black Krim tomatoes), to pumpkins that taste "insipid and watery" but which possess "spectacular beauty" (Rouge Vif d'Étampes pumpkins).

The amount of variety here, while excellent, isn't quite as over-the-top amazing as that from Seed Saver's Exchange (about which more in a later post, perhaps, when the catalog arrives), but it's plenty to keep me happy planning my small garden.  There are lots of other things to like in the catalog, too.  I like the fact that it includes both open-pollinated and hybrid varieties, and that you can in many cases order very small amounts of seed (e.g. 0.2-gram packets of tomato seed for $1.20).  If that's not enough, they have the other end of the scale, too - 28 grams of Brandywine tomato seed (probably about 9,000 seeds) for $42.  (As you may have gathered from the Early Girl description above, a lot of their customers are small commercial growers serving farmers' markets.)  As a teacher, I love this line in the "How Not to Order" section:  "We will return illegible or difficult-to-collate orders.  We will mail you the proper order form so you can try again."  Since Fedco is based in Maine, they carry a lot of short-season or cold-tolerant varieties, useful for those of you in colder climes (I'm lookin' at you, Minnesota).  

That's enough meta-gardening for tonight, I think; time to get in bed and plan for spring.