Parks Seeds Came Today

– Posted in: Catalog review
2 comments

Parks is owned by Wayside, which also owns The Cook’s Garden. If they own anything else, let me know. I like to keep track of these liasons. Did you know there are two versions of the Park’s catalog? A bigger one and a smaller one. I think I have the bigger one. It’s 132 pages counting the back cover. The smaller one is under a hundred pages. I’ve never compared the two, though I usually wind up getting both. I’ve never bought an awful lot from Parks. They used to have an early blooming cosmos (was it called Vega? I’ll have to check) but it doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Early bloom in cosmos came to be important to me after I saw my first plants devastated by frost just days after the first bloom. They are not at all frost hardy–don’t even think cold thoughts around them–and they take a while to start blooming, especially if it’s a cool summer, or if you start them in the ground instead of indoors.

About the Author

Kathy Purdy is a colchicum evangelist, converting unsuspecting gardeners into colchicophiles. She gardens in rural upstate NY, which used to be USDA Hardiness Zone 4 but is now Zone 5. Kathy’s been writing since 4th grade, gardening since high school, and blogging since 2002. Find her on Instagram as kopurdy.

In the end, this may be the most important thing about frost: Frost slows us down. In spring, it tempers our eagerness. In fall, it brings closure and rest. In our gotta-go world–where every nanosecond seems to count–slowness can be a great gift. So rather than see Jack Frost as an adversary, you could choose to greet him as a friend.

~Philip Harnden in A Gardener’s Guide to Frost: Outwit the Weather and Extend the Spring and Fall Seasons

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Kathy December 21, 2003, 7:23 am

Thanks, Chan! That’s exactly the type of information I was looking for, and now I’ve got it bookmarked.

Chan S. December 19, 2003, 9:55 pm

Came across this handy dandy listing of gardening company family trees at the Garden Watchdog site (http://gardenwatchdog.com/whoownswhat.php–sorry for the unformatted link), including info on Park and Jung.