On my homestead, I grow some cold-loving greens and herbs in winter, but otherwise my gardens won’t be productive until the warmer weather returns in late spring. For avid gardeners like me, the short days, cold air, bare trees, overcast skies and lack of greenery give us the wintertime blues.
As eager as I am to start a garden, it’s too early to plant any spring crops in the Pee Dee region. In early spring, it might be unseasonably warm, or it might be unforgivingly frigid. My next article (in February) will include a spring planting schedule for our region, but for now, be patient.
In the meantime, all we can do is remember the ripe tomatoes, crunchy cucumbers and sweet melons from last summer. Or is it?
Seed catalogs can help scratch the gardener’s winter itch.
For the moment, forget about online seed vendors. Nothing compares to the colorful hard copy seed catalogs that arrive in the mail during the coldest months of winter. Thumbing through those lushly illustrated pages, teeming with photographs of spectacular vegetables, flowers, herbs and other plants, we are mesmerized.
Seed catalogs are beyond flashy. They are flamboyant. They sate a gardener’s lust during the dreariest months. They give a different meaning to garden smut.
This phenomenon is nothing new. The first garden catalogs were printed over 400 years ago, depicting hand-tinted line drawings of Dutch tulip bulbs for sale during the Tulip Mania period in the 1600s. In the 1800s, mail-order catalogs that offered vegetable and flower seeds, bulbs, live fruit trees and houseplants were widely distributed. One can only imagine how popular those mail-order seed catalogs became with the introduction of cross-country rail travel and delivery.
Among the most familiar names in seed catalogs is Burpee’s, which began offering catalogs in the late 1800s. When founder W. Atlee Burpee died in 1915, Burpee’s was the largest seed company in the world, mailing over a million catalogs a year and receiving 10,000 orders a day!
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