Seed Catalog: The Uncut Edition

Seed Catalog: The Uncut Edition

Posted by Heather Harris

Christmas is over, it's freezing outside, and I have successfully reorganized every cobwebby corner of my entire house until there is literally nothing left for me and my bouncing, hollering children to do this winter break except bounce and holler. My dad was over last night talking about his Norwegian ancestors that came through Ellis Island and headed west to Montana to live in a cabin smaller than my living room with thirteen of their closest family members. All I could think of was some poor mother with a half dozen kids trapped inside the cabin for six long months because their fingers would snap off if they went outside. Seriously, it is not starvation that threatened those children during those dark Montana winters ...

I sunk down on the couch, asking my Ninja-turtle shelled son to "quiet down" for the twenty-fifth time, lazily looked around the living room that would have housed an entire farm family and then I noticed it. Artfully tucked beneath one of my vegetable gardening books was the  three hundred and fifty-four page seed catalog my mother and father-in-law had given me for Christmas. Yes, this a catalog worth gifting. I had stowed it away in my cleaning frenzy and completely forgotten about it. I darted across the room, greedily snatched it from the shelf and dove back onto the couch knocking three matchbox cars and a cat out of my way.

I pried back the pages, promising myself to read the farmer's note and essays before peeking at the vegetables when two children catapulted off the back of the couch from out of nowhere and landed on either side of me beginning a long interrogation about every detail of the page in front of me. "What's that?" "A cactus"."Who's he?" "Joe". "What's he doing?" "Looking for edible plants all over the world"."Why?" "He's a botanical explorer". "What's that?" "A person who looks for plants all over the world." "Why?" "Because they want to find things no one has seen before." "No one had ever seen that cactus?" "Well the people who live by the cactus have seen it, but not us." "Oh... What's that?"  I answered the first twenty nine questions and then threatened to send them outside if they didn't find something to do. It worked!

And it's a good thing because the catalog is x-rated. It is essentially vegetable pornography. From the title, "The Whole Seed Catalog" to the whirling kernels on the cover fanned out like a french can-can dancer skirt, to the full-color glossy photographs of the most tantalizing, exotic vegetables curated from every corner of the earth, the entire book is a testament to what the herbaceous world has to offer that most likely will never cross your path, even if you plant it. Even the melon the Italians call, "Brutto ma Buono" (Ugly but good) looks somehow sexy in all its warty. leperous glory. It is a very dangerous catalog. It has me re-contemplating ideas long dead: Maybe I can grow a melon. Who says I can't start my entire garden from seed? Picking a vegetable solely because of its romantic name is perfectly sensible. I'm looking at you Noir de Carmes!

It also doesn't help that these are all heritage seeds, which like fathers, come with charming histories about how their ancestors saved them up on a shelf in a small cabin with 13 kids who managed not to break the little glass jar as they played indoor hockey every day of that crazy Montana winter in `06. It is utterly irresistible. I can't tell you how many seeds I have underlined. It's embarrassing.

Of course this can only end badly. I already know that disappointment is looming at my sliding glass door come spring time, even as I salivate over the retouched images of shishito peppers, scarlet kale, and Cambodian eggplants. But dang it, a girl can dream. And I need my own story to pass down to the generations, so maybe my accidental cross pollination of a fungo squash with a vulcan chard will create some enchanting new variety and I can make up my own romantic name like "Mr. Knightly" or "Fitzwilliam Darcy". That will definitely sell. Especially when I explain how its seed was saved from the clutches of a four foot Ninja Turtle one long, cold winter in '15.

Ballad of the Impatient Gardener

Ballad of the Impatient Gardener

Posted by Heather Harris

When the rain starts falling, and doing any kind of gardening, even planting the five raspberries growing wan and sickly in my garage, is impossible, I turn, like any addict facing a supply shortage, to the next most desirable activity: reading. Last night I came upon this gem of a poem from  Robert Service, the Bard of the Yukon:

From the Ballad of Blasphemous Bill:

 You know what it's like in the  Yukon Wild

       when it's sixty-nine below;

When the ice-worms wriggle their

       purple heads through the crust of the 

       pale blue snow;

When the pine-trees crack like little guns

      in the silence of the wood,

And the icicles hang down like tusks

     under the parka hood;

When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden

    off, and the sky is weirdly lit,

And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns

    like a red-hot spit;

When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the 

    frost-fiend stalks to kill-

Well, it was just like that the day when I 

   set out to look for Bill.

-Robert Service

So, I thought I'd take a stab at one for our winter climate:

Ballad of the Impatient Gardener

You know what it's like in the Western Wood

when the rivers overflow

When the earthworms wriggle their

swollen heads through the muck of the

mud below

When the fir trees blow like angry beasts

in the howling, fearsome gale,

And the rain runs down like slimy trails,

from the wet and loathsome snail;

When the clammy cold seeps sudden

in; and your bones begin to ache,

And the comfort of your woolen sock is

lost in your boot's lake;

When the gutter's clogged with rotted leaves, and the

storm drains start to fail-

Well, it was just like that the day when I

set out to plant my kale.

Winter's Heartbeat

Winter's Heartbeat

Posted by Heather Harris

I've been reading a lot of gardening literature lately, and whenever I get to the section of the story,column, or essay written in February, they all say," Winter is a great time to look at the bones of your garden." Every. Single. One. It seems to be the only thing to say about February. But what on earth does it mean? I get the whole metaphor that the garden is dead, you're looking at the bones that are left to see the structure, plan for the year to come, etc., but what earthly good does it do to look at the "bones"? How does leering at my naked trees tell me anything about what the garden is going to look like in late August? Does a doctor look at my X-ray to see if I'll be healthy in the coming year?  Does looking at an empty plate clue me in to dinner? Does I-205 at 3 o'clock in the morning enlighten me to my evening commute? No. I think the February writer
should simply say, "Winter is a good time to...see what your garden looks like in winter." Or, more poetically, "Winter is a good time to find the heartbeat of your garden".

Moments ago two mallards were attempting to murder each other in our pond. They spun around in a frantic, synchronized circle like ninja figure skaters. They sliced at each other's heads with the tips of their wings and then stabbed their bills violently at each other's neck. The female, who I can safely surmise was the cause of the death match, dove for shore and flew off. After one jab too many, one of the males did too. The victor swam around in confused circles wondering what had just happened. Suddenly the female reappeared and began shoveling her bill into the muddy grass searching for a slumbering slug. The male waddled over and peacefully dined with her.

During the snow storm last week I strapped on my snowshoes and crunched across the field out to our creek. I watched, motionless, as the water wove in an out of the snow-covered ice bridges that had formed on the surface of the creek. Ice hung like crystals off the ancient weeping willow tree, while squirrels stripped bark off of the redwoods, leaving the trunks fuzzy and red like scarlet sweaters.

Little fritillaria leaves are pushing up through the mulch near my doorway. I've spotted daffodils and hyacinth too. A tree on my drive home the other day had grown through a brick sidewalk in the same fashion, pushing the mortar up and out over the years as easily as the little flowers were emerging from the earth.

After the snow melted, I walked under the birch tree in our front yard and collected the branches that were too delicate to hold up under the weight of the ice. I had a huge pile of broken pieces and decided to make a trellis for the vegetable garden. The casualties of winter supporting spring's peas.

My February advice is this: Don't waste your winter studying your garden's bones. Go feel its pulse.

Buried Roots

Buried Roots

Posted by Heather Harris

I planted bare root strawberries last weekend. Last weekend it was a sunny 51 degrees. Last weekend I didn't even have a coat on. Last weekend I thought, "This is the loveliest winter we've ever had. A gardener's dream!"  Today there are three inches of snow squatting on top of those delicate, naked little roots, mocking me and my naivete.

During all assumed planting disasters, I turn to the Internet. I do not do this when I'm actually planting. Why stop and consult the experts when there are cute little bundles of strawberry plants ready to be planted? How hard could it be? No, it is only when impending doom is before me that I decide to look up what I was supposed to have done before lovingly tucking the roots into the ground for burial.

This time I discovered that no one knows what they're doing. There was so much contradicting information on the proper way to plant bare root strawberries that I now know less than I did when I began. Soak the roots, don't soak the roots. Plant within 48 hours of getting the plants, wait till March. Trim the roots before planting, don't trim the roots. Mix in fifty-five soil amendments, leave the soil alone. So I did what all of us do when seeking a more informed opinion: I only looked at the facts that confirmed what I thought to begin with.

1. Plant the bare root strawberries right away. Check.

2. Make a hole a little bigger than the roots and leave the crown above the soil. Check.

3. Space them fourteen inches apart. Check ( Although I didn't measure it. Let's be real.)

4. Plant them in a raised bed. Check.

5. Plant local varieties. Tristars and Hoods, Check.

6.  Bare root plants can take alternating freezing and snow cover after planting. Hooray!

It turns out I'm an amazingly intuitive gardener! Just follow these steps, and I'm sure your bare root strawberries will turn out perfectly. And if not, just go look at someone else's blog and I'm sure you'll find the list you're looking for.