yes! yes! yes!

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

My favorite season just rolled in with the mail truck; I got the first of the 2009 seed catalogs today!

[NM_Shooter]

Do you prefer to buy mail order seeds rather than at the local feed store?  Why?  Better selection?

-f-

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Actually, I save most of my own seeds or get them from friends or people I meet at farmers markets, etc.  However, I really like Johnny's because they have great customer service and I have never bought anything from them that I regretted later.  They have a good selection of organics and heirlooms.  I've also ordered a time or two from Park's and from Gurney's and Stark Brothers.  Mostly I like to look and daydream.  I never buy anything like potatoes or onion sets or anything from a catalog, but I do buy new varieties and new veggies sometimes that I've not tried before.  It isn't a terribly expensive vice because I limit myself to a small amount, and it is only this one time a year, and I don't order something every year.  Guess it is kind of inexplicable, really...  I don't know.  I just like the glossy photos and seeing what's out there and the possibilities, I guess.  And it must be genetic or something because the girls get just as excited over it.  Hopefully if all goes as planned and within a year we'll get a chance to order fruit trees.  By the way, my daughters (4 and 6) just went through the catalog and "happy faced" every variety they want to try, which is practically everything in the book.  I always tell my friends with kids who are picky eaters that the best way to cure it is to let a kid grow her own food... then they appreciate every bite and every subtle flavor difference.  (My oldest will tell you quickly which variety of cucumbers tastes better fresh or in kimchee and which ones make the best canned pickles, and which pumpkins have the best seeds for toasting.)  Our middle one won't even eat tomatoes from the store unless they're canned as some sort of a sauce... she knows the raw ones will taste like cardboard compared with what she can grow herself.

Another reason I like the seed catalogs is that it seems like the local feed stores and nurseries carry only the tried 'n' true veggies that everyone grows, but not the really unusual stuff.  I've never seen burdock or salsify or even parsnips in the local stores.  There are usually 1-2 types of melons, 1-2 types of tomatoes, and so forth.  I have a seed mail-order company to thank for my favorite cherry tomatoes.  I'd never have found them in the stores.  (Matt's Wild Cherry, if you're interested... tiny, but prolific and very very tasty.)  I also got my seeds for Numex twilight hot peppers from a seed catalog several years ago... so pretty that you hate to pick them, but so hot you'll most likely never forget it when you do.  And painted mountain corn... makes the best cornbread I've ever tasted.  And Tom Thumb mini popcorn (the kids thought that it was really cute and the plant itself was ornamental enough to take a place in the flower bed), whose kernals were as big as regular ones once popped, but without as much of the hard kernal that gets caught in your teeth.  Kakai pumpkins, for the hull-less green seeds that are so good roasted with cayenne pepper.... and so on.  Also, a lot of the local stores seem to provide seeds that grow more commercially appealing veggies and fruits because they sacrifice flavor for uniform appearance, mass production, and shelf life. 

I usually do buy seed potatoes and onions at the local feed store.  One thing that I also do is buy a few blue potatoes from the grocery store and grow potatoes from them....one thing I've found is that no matter what kind of weather year you have, the blue potatoes will consistently give you a harvest, where the others might rot from moisture or die from a lack of it.  I also buy some seeds for Korean veggies from the local Korean market, and I get my seed sweet potatoes (gogoma) from the Korean market because they're so good baked that they taste like they already have butter and sugar added... haven't found a variety yet that can compare from an American seed company.  (We also grow the standard orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, also usually with slips started from last year's.)  In fact, I just bought some sweet potatoes from the Korean market last weekend with the intent of starting them indoors to plant out in spring.

[Whitlock]

Dang Homey you should have your own catalog

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

 ???Hmm.  That's what my husband tells me too.

[Whitlock]

I'm with you Homey If the world goes to $%^& in a hand basket. What would be better to have than seeds? In the mean time they sure are fun

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Whitlock, I read with my kids every day, and we've been reading through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books for a while now.  Actually, we read three of them and then mom brought me the whole set from when I was a kid, and we started over from the beginning.  We just finished reading Farmer Boy night before last and I was struck by the wisdom from a kids' book.  Here are a few quotes that sum up a lot of how I think and feel about things, only more eloquently than I could've said it:

          "There's no 'but' about it!" Mother said.  "Oh, it's bad enough to see Royal come down to being nothing
     but a storekeeper!  Maybe he'll make money, but he'll never be the man you are.  Truckling to other people
     for his living, all his days--He'll never be able to call his soul his own."
          For a minute Almanzo wondered if Mother was going to cry.
          "There, there," Father said, sadly.  "Don't take it too much to heart.  Maybe it's all for the best, somehow."
          "I won't have Almanzo going the same way!" Mother cried.  "I won't have it, you hear me?"
          "I feel the same way you do," said Father.  "But the boy'll have to decide.  We can keep him here on the farm by law
      till he's twenty-one, but it won't do any good if he's wanting to go.  No.  If Almanzo feels the way Royal does, we
      better apprentice him to Paddock while he's young enough."
          "He's too young to know his own mind," Mother objected.
          Almanzo took another big mouthful of pie.  He could not speak till he was spoken to, but he thought to himself
     that he was old enough to know he'd rather be like Father than like anybody else.  He did not want to be like Mr.
     Paddock, even.  Mr. Paddock had to please a mean man like Mr. Thompson, or lose the sale of a wagon. Father
     was free and independent; if he went out of his way to please anybody, it was because he wanted to.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

A little later, it continues:
          "Well, son, you think about it,: said Father.  "I want you should make up your own mind.  With Paddock, you'd have an  easy life, in some ways.  You wouldn't be out in all kinds of weather.  Cold winter nights, you could lie snug in bed and not worry about young stock freezing.  Rain or shine, wind or snow, you'd be under shelter.  You'd be shut up, inside walls.  Likely you'd always have plenty to eat and wear and money in the bank."
          "James!" Mother said.
          "That's the truth, and we must be fair about it, " Father answered.  "But there's the other side, too, Almanzo.  You'd have to depend on other folks, son, in town.  Everything you got, you'd get from other folks.
          "A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather.  If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber.   You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come.  You'll be free and independent, son, on a farm."

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Mail came with the second seed catalog of the season and my oldest came hollering all the way from the mailbox, "Seed catalog!  Seed catalog!  Gurney's is here!"  She was hollering for her sister to come see (this is outside, barefoot, on the last day of December, no less.) I'm sure the neighbors already think we're a little strange, but if not, that probably solidified it for them.  Anyway, I was on the phone with the title company in WI so both of the big girls flopped down on their bellies in the office floor and started picking out stuff they wanted to try.  They didn't stop until they looked at everything on every page, either.  I was a little too wound up about the house selling to look as thoroughly as they did.