And, in case anyone is wondering, I have also conclusively decided that New Girl is currently the toughest tomato I know of. It’s a small tomato, but I have inadvertently discovered that I can’t kill it, and it produces no matter how it is tortured. The last time I had ordered it was years ago, when I first started gardening and wasn’t really keeping track of anything. I had started trying other varieties, just to see what they were like, and forgot about New Girl. But last year I found the (old) seeds, and decided to start a few. Even though it was a scorcher of a year, they produced. This year, I started the last few seeds. And this year, it rained so much, and was so cloudy and cool, that almost every tomato in the garden split or struggled to ripen, or both. New Girl was the only tomato that didn’t split on me–I don’t believe even a single one. (This was quite dramatic compared the Glacier tomato I had decided to try–every single one split, and I didn’t get to taste one.) The fact that New Girl can take either extreme and still not hate me makes it a very special tomato.

As is my habit every spring, I test my seeds to see whether they’re still any good, or if I need to buy new ones. This is a very easy thing to do–you stick half a damp paper towel in a little plastic bag, drop in ten seeds (5 if you’re starting to run short, or if they’re big seeds, like squash). Write the date you started them, and wait to see what sprouts.

Almost every year, 10 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 seeds sprout without fail. I though that perhaps that was exclusive to Johnny’s, but my Fedco seeds had the same result.

My one bug-a-boo is Seeds of Change. (I should point out that I don’t recall having any problem getting their seed to sprout for me the first time around; if I did, it wasn’t enough to burn it into my memory.) From last year, my American Spinach from Seeds of Change only sprouted 2 of 5. Seeds of Change Yellow crookneck squash, from ‘04, not a single one sprouted. For the Oregon Spring tomato, I had some seeds from Seeds of Change from ‘04, and some from Johnny’s from ‘03–the Johnny’s sprouted first, and just as well as the Seeds of Change–4/5. (A Johnny’s ‘04 Brandywine tomato sprouted 5/5, and a Johnny’s ‘03 New Girl tomato only sprouted 1/5.) On the other hand, my Rueben’s Red lettuce from last year, also from Seeds of Change, sprouted 10/10–and therein lies the reason I continue to buy from Seeds of Change. They’re actually a company based out somewhere south (New Mexico, I think), and so don’t really cater to us Northern gardeners. But! They sell Rueben’s Red lettuce, which I love, and cannot find anywhere else. It’s a red romaine, and not only does it taste great, it takes any kind of abuse you–or at least, I– throw at it. Except slugs. (I hate slugs.)

For this year, I dropped Oregon Spring Tomatoes. We started getting it for our cool nights, but Oregon Spring actually does better in cool weather, and it’s terrible in hot weather. In other words, if we get “squish weather”–cool and rainy, all summer long, then Oregon Spring does well. In hot drought weather, it does quite terrible. As droughts are much more common around here than cool weather, I’m dropping the Oregon Spring. Instead, I’m trying “Glacier” as an early tomato. I don’t know if I’ll have any better luck with it, but it’s worth a shot.

I have all of my seeds now; this is what I got:

• Broccoli, Arcadia Rugged, good tasting standby
• Beans, Fortex Green beans that always taste great, no matter how big; withstood the torturous conditions of last year.
• Carrot, Shin Koruda A carrot that’s supposed to thrive in clay soil, taste sweet, and give good yields.
• Cucumber, Little Leaf Standby cucumber, very productive; can’t seem to kill it no matter how hard I try.
• Corn, Fleet (1/2 lb) New variety this year; a bi-color, sugary enhanced, cold weather corn that’s supposed to taste even better that the last variety we were using.
• Lettuce, Jericho A green romaine, stress tolerant, sweet and productive.
• Lettuce, Rueben’s Red A red romaine, my best-tasting lettuce I’ve ever found, extremely stress tolerant.
• Melon, Verona A watermelon; Evan’s going to try it out this year.
• Oregano, Greek If fresh basil tastes so much better than dried, fresh oregano must be a million times better than dried, too.
• Peas, Lincoln (1 lb) The best tasting peas I’ve ever found.
• Peas, Green Arrow (1/2 lb.) Supposed to be earlier and more productive than Lincoln.
• Potato, Kennebec (10lb.) Reliable potato that makes large tubers, stores well, and puts up with stress better than most.
• Potato, Dark Norland Red (5 lb.) Early red potato
• Pumpkin, New England Pie Evan is growing it; real pumpkin pumpkin pies taste best.
• Spinach, America My favorite tasting spinach
• Sunflower, Velvet Queen Evan is growing these deep burgundy flowers
• Tomato, Brandywine The famous, the delicous, huge, meaty sandwich tomatoes. I had a lot of blossom end rot with these last year; I’m going to try putting crushed eggshells in their planting holes this year. I’ve heard the calcium is supposed to help with blossom end rot, so we’ll just have to see.
• Tomato, Sungold Those sweet orange cherry tomatoes. (They have a tendency to split a lot after rain. The only cure I’ve found is no rain. They will actually grow without much rain, but the rain always makes them split
• Tomato, Glacier A cool weather, early, early tomato
• Tomato, Paste, AmishI’m hoping to freeze–not can!–tomatoes this year.

I still have on hand Butternut squash, yellow crookneck squash, basil, parsley, dill and leeks.

When I showed a friend of mine this list, she laughed at how many times “stress tolerant” popped up! Yes, but for a good reason.

If you’ll remember, Mom did a post on Soil Maps and Surveys. I felt she left out some telling information, so I’m putting it here: Our garden is, by the map, either Mardin Channery Silt loam, 8-15 percent slopes, or Volusia Channery silt loam, 8 to 15 percent slopes. Part of the description for the Mardin Channery Silt loam, 8-15 percent slope, reads “Droughtiness in midsummer and the hazard of erosion are limitations for farm use. Seasonal wetness, slow permeability, low fertility, and strong slopes are limitations for many nonfarm uses.” See also, capablity unit IIIe. “Class III Soils have severe limitations that reduce the choice of plants, require special conservation practices, or both.” and “Needed are measures that safely remove excess surface water and conserve moisture for summer crops.”

Volusia Channery silt loam, 8 to 15 percent slope, reads similarly dismally: “. . .the supply of organic matter is depleted, and there are mores stones on the surface than in uneroded areas . . . Wetness and continuing erosion are the main limitations, and midsummer drought is a hazard. The natural fertility is low as a result of erosion. The moisture-holding capacity is very low. Seasonal wetness and shallowness to the slowly permeable fragipan are limitations to many nonfarm uses. ” See also class IVe-4. “Soils have very severe limitations that reduce the choice of plants, require very careful management, or both.”

So, in a nutshell, we have rocky, clay soil, with little organic matter or natural fertility, and has a shallowness for root growth. Its moisture runs in extremes; it floods in the spring and droughts in the summer. Add to all of that our last frost date is usually June 7th, with a first frost is mid-September. I’m pretty sure that reads “STRESS!!!” for just about any typical vegetable garden, and I do my best to find plants that can cope.

The first clue that there was going to be some really out of the ordinary stuff in this catalog was in the cucumber section. Now, almost everyone has seen the lemon cukes by now, but they also had pictures for “Mexican Sour Gherkin”, which looks just like a miniature watermelon, and Hmong Red and Chinese Yellow, as well as Poona Cheera which looks sort of like a mix between a sweet potato and a cucumber. In the cucumber section was also where I first noticed the quotes they were putting in (in this case, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius–and a lot of courage–to move in the opposite direction.” –Albert Einstein”).

At this point, it was impossible not to start making comparisons between them and Fedco. (That’s where the tale of two catalogs comes in.) But more on all of that later. First I want to finish drooling over all the many varieties found pictured in this catalog . . .they don’t even have a picture for everything they’re selling, though I’m sure they picked the most diverse pictures to use.

Things started getting truly weird when we got to Eggplant. The first picture is of “Thai Long Green”, which is lime green and quite slender. The next picture is for “Thai Green Pea”, which looks almost exactly like a slightly over-mature green pea (and the same size, too), and I would have never known it was an eggplant if someone hadn’t told me. Then there is also “Thai Yellow Egg”, which looks like an egg yolk with a stem coming out of it, and “Cambodian Green Giant,” that looks sort of like a green bell pepper, except that its bottom half is white. “Rosa Bianca” looks similar to a head of garlic, and “Ping Tung” looks like a tomato–and these are all eggplant!

Their melon selection is mind-boggling, as is their squash section. I have never seen such a large selection of melons of all shapes, sizes, colors, splotches, stripes and patterns. The same could be said of the squash, which often times looked like over-sized gourds, and came in colors from slate grey, to purple, to green, to tan, to hunter orange.

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I got to the tomatoes. I know there are whole catalogs full of nothing but tomatoes, pages and pages of red fruit. The first 12 tomatoes here are green tomatoes. I grew some green tomatoes in this past year, so that wasn’t too surprising, though I confess to say I’ve never seen a green tomato the shape of a fat pork sausage. Next comes the neon orange tomatoes (including “Orange Banana”), and then then pink tomatoes (including an accordian shaped fruit, which was deeply fluted, and “German Lunchbox”, which looked almost exactly like an apple, complete with a yellow blush at one end and little yellow speckles all over it). Then we get a dozen purple tomatoes, complete with one that looks just like a Barlett pear. Then we finally get to the red tomatoes. . .and then the striped tomatoes. . .and then the white tomatoes!. . .and then the yellow tomatoes. I must say, the white tomatoes look quite gross. They look rather akin to the tomatoes I find up in the garden after a couple hard frosts and a chance to half rot–in a word, disgusting. And the yellow tomatoes come in all shapes and sizes, candle shaped and lemon or plum shaped. . .It was almost a surprise to actually see a mostly round yellow tomato!

And now we get to the part where we compare catalogs, between Fedco and Baker Creek. Both of these companies are against gene-altered plants, plant variety protection, and are apt to spread their ideas throughout the catalog. Fedco’s carries itself in such a way that even if you don’t agree with everything they say, you have to admire their poise and good humor. Baker Creek carries itself in such a way that even if you do agree with a lot of what they have to say, you still find them extremely annoying, and wish they’d please be quiet. This is most obvious in the quotes they choose to print; Fedco’s are usually more obscure (you’re not that likely to have heard them half a dozen times before), don’t repeat themselves, and can often be humorous or slightly subtle. Baker Creek, on the other hand, picks only quotes that are as blunt as a sledge hammer, have been heard before, and, to top it all off, after a few pages they got tired of finding new ones and instead switched to repeating one quote over and over again, like a grating recording that one gets stuck with when one is put on hold. They insisted on putting the quotes in a larger font and a different color, so it was impossible to ignore them. Several pages in the front and several pages in the back, as well as a centerfold spread (and this catalog is much slimmer than Fedco’s), were devoted to nothing more than Baker Creek propaganda, including pages of country music singers and people dressed up like cowboys.

Fedco’s is apt to print very long descriptions, talking about everything from yield, growing conditions, how it compared to other varietes, and taste. Baker Creek was more worried about telling you how old it was, where it came from, and how there are a lot of varieties in danger of becoming extinct, and how well it would sell in the markets, how nice they looked–and, oh, yes, of course they all taste great.

For instance, Aunt Ruby’s German Green.

I described it like this:

The cousins of the Brandywines, “Aunt Ruby’s German Green” tomatoes were quite a novelty, but that is about it. They didn’t produce very well (that is, very many), though perhaps it was a bad year to ask. (Then again, droughts aren’t that much of an anomaly around here, so if they can’t take the conditions they’re just out of luck.) They aren’t totally green when ripe–they get a slight tinging of pink on the bottom, which spreads throughout the inside of the fruit. Their taste was described to me as “incredible” by the person who recommended them to me. To me, they tasted (and here I must borrow some Rundy-speak) like a Brandywine with all of the red sucked out. Sweet and fruity, yet with none of rich “red” taste that makes you think TOMATO. As fruit, it was interesting. As a tomato, when it was sliced and placed amongst other tomaotes, no one would eat them until last. It just didn’t taste right on a tuna fish sandwich or hamburger. So it was fun to try, but not really worth my time.

Fedco’s describes them like this:

One newspaper writer describes it as “a voluptuous chartreuse beauty, sassy and spicy like apple pie.” If you think green tomatoes are good only for mincemeat, your first taste of Aunt Ruby’s will change your mind forever. I rate it second only to Brandywine for flavor and it is on just about everyone’s top ten list. Oblate 12-16 oz. fruits blush lightly yellow and develop an amber-pink tinge on the blossom end when ripe. Watch closely and don’t allow them to get too soft before picking. The green flesh of this beefsteak is faintly marbled with pink. Flavor sweet and tart, rich and spicy. The central large tomatoes are the best. Flavor deteriorates when cold weather sets in. Created a sensation at our staff taste-testing in September 1996, where it was rated “good” or “excellent” by all who tried it. Aunt Ruby’s is not just the best green eating tomato, it also makes a delicious basis for salsa verde. From Ruby Arnold of Greenville, TN, who got it from her grandfather who brought it from Germany.

And Baker Creek describes them like this:

One of the largest green beefsteaks. Can grow to over 1 pound and are just delicious. They have brilliant, neon-green flesh with a strong, sweet and fruity flavor, much tastier than most red tomatoes. This family heirloom from Germany is beautiful. The 2003 winner of the 2003 Heirloom Garden Show’s taste test.

This description gets under my skin for several reasons. First if all, it’s a very poor description–what, exactly does “tasty” mean? Secondly, they seem very biased in the favor of green tomatoes. “Emerald Evergreen” is said to be “one of the best”, “Green Zebra” is “A favorite tomato of many high class chefs, specialty markets, and home gardeners. . .[and] the most striking tomato in our catalog.” “Green Grapes” is said to “Makes most red cherries taste bland in comparison. “Green Sausage is “The latest ‘Must Have’. It is is simply outstanding!” After awhile, you just can’t believe all the superlatives. Apparently all their tomatoes are better than any other tomato. Another thing that bothers me is its poor description of how it looks. If you pick these tomatoes when they’re still neon green, they taste like a green tomato–I mean, like an un-ripe tomato. They’re not ripe till the color fades and the pink blush begins. The fact that they do such a poor job describing a fruit I know makes me very leery of their descriptions of fruits that I don’t know.

In the end, the catalog is a nice picture book (and probably a very good place to find rare vegetables). But it certainly does not make very good reading material, nor does it make it very easy to figure out what to get.

I don’t recall ever getting a less than perfect potato from Johnny’s; in my Fedco order, several had been sliced almost–but not quite–in half. The wound looked as though it had healed, but it wasn’t promising. A few were also moldy upon arrival. Quite frankly, I don’t think the loss in quality is worth the wider selection. Most potatoes just taste like potatoes anyway. Of all the new varieties I tried last year, nothing stood out to me. (I should also add that I didn’t complain to Fedco about the quality of the potatoes, so it’s possible that if you’re more vocal than me you would get compensation of some sort. I don’t know.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that Johnny’s seeds may also have a better germination rate, but I haven’t tested that out. And, if that was the case, I’m still more inclined to buy seeds from Fedco due to lower cost, more seed, and greater variety. I can get more different types of vegetables, and try out more varieties with Fedco. I may have to start a few extra seeds to get the final amount of plants, but I’ll still have paid less. Often times, like with the peppers I tried last year (and were the most successful pepper planting ever on this property, which I suppose isn’t saying much) aren’t offered at Johnny’s. . . or anywhere else besides Fedco, to my knowledge (which is quite limited, but you go with what you know).

The first frost is probably on its way tonight, as evidenced by the heaps and heaps of flowers I cut and brought in. Oh, and the still, clear night air, and the rapidly approaching chill. This is slightly late for our first frost, but I am certainly not complaining, particularly since last night was the first night I slept under a real roof in over 4 weeks. (As Mom mentioned earlier, I’ve been sleeping out in a tent in the front lawn as we undergo renovations.) A light sheet carelessly tossed might protect tomatoes, but they don’t protect delicate little girls! At 43 degrees of the last morning we were out, we could already see our breath inside of the tent. I wasn’t cold (except for sometimes my nose) as I had 4 blankets and one heavy duty sleeping bag, plus the tent, but nonetheless I wasn’t eager to experience frost first hand.

At any rate, as the gardening season for us has basically come to a close, I figured I ought to write a post.

I brought in the best pepper harvest I ever have, which is to say, not much. Any harvest at all is more of a harvest than I’ve gotten before. Many of them are even red! I am tickled pink about all of that, particularly since the peppers were one of my most abused (by me, not the weather) plants this year. There is hope for peppers yet! Next year, I will try harder.

The most interesting story is probably about the beans. I’ve yet to have much luck with beans, again, probably because I never put in enough effort. This year, I dutifully planted them out, sometime in July. It was after our July 9th rain, which means right around the beginning of our longest dry spell. I hauled water up and watered them everyday till they sprouted, but after that, they were pretty much on their own. As we began to put tighter and tighter restrictions on our own water usage, I could no longer justify the extra water for something that never did well for me anyway. They seemed to be surviving (though not exactly thriving) on their own, and I began to get hopeful. Then the horrid rabbits cut most of them down to the ground, which caused many dark storm clouds to swirl about my head (but, unfortunately, not producing any rain for the poor plants). After that, I pretty much gave up on them. But this seems to be the year for stubbornly productive plants. Our fall rains are finally starting, and as I looked at the garden this afternoon, I realized that all of the beans were blooming! So they have been covered with sheets, in hopes that we won’t get regular frost for a while yet, and I can eke out a few beans.

Speaking of the fall rains, my fall crop of lettuce is coming up! I planted it around the same time as the beans, sometime in July. I didn’t water them, as I figured they would have the sense to come up when the time was right. It appears the time is right. I wish them much plentiful growth, but I am not holding my breath. This is the first time I’ve ever tried a fall crop of lettuce, but one hardly thinks that a major drought year is the best time to experiment.

My broccoli is blooming. Apparently I had a whole row of broccoli that could have been eaten, but it seems it was ready to be harvested while I was in the midst of helping to frame out walls, applying a skim coat of plaster and other such renovation tasks. Working from the time I got up till the time I went to bed, I never got a chance to check on the broccoli. I considered myself lucky to get time enough to harvest the tomatoes that I knew about.

The tomatoes, despite the drought, the slugs that ate the fruit and the blasted bunny rabbits that also at the fruit (the nerve!), produced record amounts for me. This is due to a longer growing season for them, which is, in turn, due to the fact that I started them in April inside of the house and repeatedly potted them on. By the time I planted them out, they were in huge 10″ pots, and were already beginning to bloom in their pots, so happy were they. They moped a bit when they were transplanted, but I still managed the earliest tomato (for me) ever.

For some reason, my Oregon Spring plants just couldn’t cut it this year. I say “for some reason”, but I suppose it ought to be obvious that it was the drought. I may have gotten a few tomatoes off of them, but that was all. The leftover (the seeds were several years old) New Girls were the most prolific, by far, thought their tomatoes were small. (I thought they were supposed to have larger tomatoes, but it’s been so long since I bought those seeds, I really have no idea.)

My Brandywines, though always delicious, seemed to have a terrible time this year, constantly splitting open on the undersides and then going moldy. (Gross.) I haven’t had this problem in past years. However, in past years I’ve mulched with old hay, and this year I was using leaves. Perhaps it held the moisture to the tomato better?

The cousins of the Brandywines, “Aunt Ruby’s German Green” tomatoes were quite a novelty, but that is about it. They didn’t produce very well (that is, very many), though perhaps it was a bad year to ask. (Then again, droughts aren’t that much of an anomaly around here, so if they can’t take the conditions they’re just out of luck.) They aren’t totally green when ripe–they get a slight tinging of pink on the bottom, which spreads throughout the inside of the fruit. Their taste was described to me as “incredible” by the person who recommended them to me. To me, they tasted (and here I must borrow some Rundy-speak) like a Brandywine with all of the red sucked out. Sweet and fruity, yet with none of rich “red” taste that makes you think TOMATO. As fruit, it was interesting. As a tomato, when it was sliced and placed amongst other tomaotes, no one would eat them until last. It just didn’t taste right on a tuna fish sandwich or hamburger. So it was fun to try, but not really worth my time.

The Sungold cherry tomatoes truly impressed me. They were started latest, and were just as persecuted as the rest of tomatoes. Yet they produced by the basketful, willingly and without complaint. Deirdre liked to eat them raw, but most other people, finding that they didn’t work so well in sandwiches, seemed to leave them. However, they worked great in tacos, salads, and my all time favorite of Fresh Basil and Tomato pizza. They are an orange color when ripe, and though sweet, they don’t taste as fruity as Brandywines or German Greens. Despite the less-than-red color, they still maintain a tomato-y taste.

All in all, I heard many rave reviews on the tomatoes this year. Everyone kept comment on how good they tasted this year. I think perhaps the drought–that is, less water in the fruit—caused for a more intense flavor that people enjoyed.

The potatoes grew un-remarkably. I feel I have neither a bumper crop nor a disappointing crop. They simply grew. (Though, I must add, home-grown potatoes make distinctly better mashed potatoes than any potato you buy from the grocery store. When eating home-grown mashed potatoes, I skip the gravy. They’re so flavorful and delicious already, it seems a complete shame to mask the taste.)

The herbs did well, considering the circumtances. The parsley took quite a while to get a toe-hold, but is now doing nicely. The basil did its best, resulting in many yummy pizzas, but it was certainly no pesto year. The dill did wonderful. Besides filling the freezer with lots of dill weed (which goes great in devilled eggs, and I’m sure I’ll be making many of those next Spring), it also timed itself perfectly with the cucumbers. Every jar of pickles I made had fresh dill heads on it, and the dill and cucumbers wore out at about the same time.

The cucumbers, as usual, kept me hopping. Although we could certainly eat more pickles, I never tell Rundy to plant more, because I simply can’t find the time to can anymore. (And no one wants to eat raw cucumbers, which is a bit odd. If I don’t pickle them, they just go moldy in the back corners of the fridge. Gross, again.) I don’t know how many pints I made, because people would eat them nearly as fast as I canned them. I know it was over 30 pints, but I don’t know more than that. When I talk about making so many pickles, people invariable say, “Oh yes, isn’t it wonderful stocking up for the winter?” Well, here it is, on the cusp of the first frost, and I think I might have a pint or two left. Pickles are a summer food around here. People think it’s a dreamy to have home grown tomatoes and home grown pickles on their sandwiches. And if there’s no proper sandwich to be had, then they think pickles are just dreamy. If I laid down an iron law, perhaps we might keep some till winter. But what’s the point? They’ll all get devoured anyway, and people might as well enjoy them with fresh tomatoes.

The leeks are stunted, being mostly water. The corn was miserable this year. The squash wasn’t happy either. The peas, of course, still having water, were quite happy.

And the flowers I plant, in hopes of a cutting garden, merrily bloomed away, with no one to appreciate them. Well, I appreciated the poppies, but by the time the rest of the plants started blooming, I was whisked away to working inside. So now, as I cut the rest of the stragglers, I see from the dead-heads that my cosmos did well and my nicotiana had an absolute ball, which is particularly sad. Sad that I missed it, that is, not that they did well. I love nicotiana, especially in the evening. I now have huge vases (and I do mean huge) full of cosmos, orange cosmos (which seem to be a different species, as their leaves look more marigold-ish), zinnias in a whole rainbow of colors, a few worn out nicotiana, and a big bowl full of very cheerful marigolds. Teman thought the were ‘mums, since most usual, normal marigolds are finished by now. However, my late-started, late-planted, drought-held-back marigolds were just getting ready to party up in the vegetable garden. (The ones down by the house are tapering off.) I shall enjoy them all for the week or so that they last inside of the house.

And that is about all my scatter-brained self can pull together tonight. Perhaps I left out something pertinent, in which case any questions or comments would gladly be answered.

However, since it was duly noted that I’d also received a catalog for Fedco Bulbs, my mind once again leapt to the seemingly ever-present form letter–you know, thanking you for your previous business, do try out our bulb selection, happy growing in 2005, blah blah blah. I really ought to have known better after my previous letter, but form letters are just so much more normal.

But, no. It was another handwritten letter from C.R. Lawn (except this time he used a red pen). And since he gave me permission to use his letter, I shan’t waste my time paraphrasing or mangling his words–or editing his eccentric capitalization.

Dear Talitha Purdy,

As surprised as you were to get my last letter, you may be even more surprised by this one. Recently one of my colleagues found your comments about FEDCO under Catalog Review on the web and passed them on to me. I found it an enjoyable read and appreciate your point of view.

I also think it only fair that I should allay your curiosity about who is CR Lawn at FEDCO. You ask if I am “the head honcho.” Being a co-operative, FEDCO doesn’t exactly have a head honcho or the traditional pyramidal management structure. Actually, we are currently struggling over how to describe our jobs and lines of authority for our employee handbook. It looks more like a mobius strip than a pyramid.

To finally answer your question, I founded the co-op in 1978, and was at one time in charge of everything. I have delegated and delegated until now, when I am one of the 4 co-ordinators of the Seeds division. I am also the closest thing to a Chief FINANCIAL OFFICER doing most of the accounting from posting to financial statements to corporate tax returns. In addition I write the Seeds portion of the winter catalog and collate most of the seed orders, and I still have a lot to do with long-term visioning which includes writing letters to people who complain, offer interesting suggestion or interact in some way that gets my attention. We also have a team of people who answer the phone calls so you can find a real live person and not a form response that way. I’m less enamored of the phone so I only get a select few calls that are screened & referred to me for some special expertise or angle.

You observed that I was left-handed. True enough, although this scrawl was generated with my right hand. I’m old enough to go back to the time when rural schools DIDN’T recognize left-handed inclinations and forced everyone into the mold of writing with their right. It was a struggle and it still shows. So I do other things (throw balls & saw etc) with my left.

At Fedco each division (organic grower supplies, potatoes, flower bulbs, trees, seeds) has one or more co-ordinators (the management basically) and sends 1 rep to FINANCE committee & 1 to administration & COMMUNICATIONS committee plus we have a staff-elected personnel committee. There is also a person in charge of over-all warehouse operations (Gene Frey) and two de-facto in charge of informational technology (rene & David SHIPMAN who is the OGS co-ordinator). This is probably more than you ever wanted to know about FEDCO. Please feel free to share any or all of it in your web correspondence. I’m not really a web guy, but some of my talks at gatherings & conferences are on our site.

Thank you for the nice review,
CR Lawn

Yes, indeed, I was even more surprised by this letter!

My next thought was–how did his colleagues find my review (such as it was)? I didn’t think a rather absent-minded blog post (and the long list in the garden blog directory of this site bears witness to how very many blogs there are) would be a very easy thing to stumble upon. Apparently, I was quite wrong. I just went to Google and searched for “fedco catalog reviews.” The first hit was from ZD-Net, which was the sort of “official” site I thought would be easily found. But they only gave a manufacturer profile, and it was for Fedco Electronics, which I presume is in no way whatsoever related.

And the second hit was mine. Goodness Gracious! (Does that mean I’m famous now?)

The third hit was for The Adventurous Gardener, who is telling everyone “where to buy the best plants in New England”, and gave quite proper (unlike me) reviews of both Fedco and Johnny’s Selected Seeds. (Since CR Lawn always wrote “FEDCO”, I presume it must actually be an abbreviation for something, but I like the way “Fedco” looks better, so I shall continue to write it that way for purely aesthetic reasons.) By rights, The Adventurous Gardener probably ought to have been before me.

The fourth hit was for the actual factual Fedco website, and from there on out, there was a bunch of miscellaneous other links, some of them applying and some not.

How peculiar, though. I mean, of course I knew that technically something like this could happen. But it seems rather like saying you oughtn’t play out in the rain or you’ll get struck by lightning. Of course it could technically happen, but really. It feels sort of like talking to yourself in what you thought was an empty room, and then having someone answer you from behind your back. Goodness! Where’d you come from?

Now I think I shall have to write CR Lawn (The Guy In The Middle of the Mobius Strip) back, and we can have a miserable-handwriting-contest. Only he has a good excuse, and I have none, save the fact that I talk far faster than my hands can keep up. Those are the two beautiful things about computers, you know. (1) The keyboard, which, when mastered, can allow you to babble quicker and more coherently than by ink, and (2) The Spell Checker! I hate spelling, but when I quit babbling and settle down to work, I actually have very nice handwriting (even if I do say so myself!). I enjoy calligraphy, and nearly all it entails (occasionally I get sick of washing nibs or drawing guidelines), but you would never, ever, ever guess that from my every-day sort of handwriting. Alas for the recipients of my letters!

I thought it might make some of my hot weather loving plants pout, but so far I haven’t seen any sign of it. My tomatoes are not only blooming, some of them have green tomatoes the size of golf balls on them!! This is the best I’ve ever done with tomatoes so far. I had potted them on so far (most of them into 10″ pots) that they decided they quite liked it there and had started to bloom in the pots. I thought the shock of transplanting them might make them drop the blossoms or something, but, quite to the contrary, they hit the ground running.

In the meantime, we are all battling off a cold of another sort, the kind with coughs and sore throats, and an endless mountain of thoroughly used tissues. I am pouting, even if my tomatoes aren’t.

People always say to start spinach right in the frozen ground. When the snow was just beginnng to melt and it was about 66 degrees outside, I went up to the garden and wherever I could see bare ground on what had been last year’s potato patch (and, thus, fairly well dug already) I sowed lettuce, spinach and dill. When the weather warmed and dried enough to make preparing the garden possible, there was no sign of any sprouts, and Teman wanted to more adequately dig the garden. Since it looked as though nothing intended to come up, I told him to go ahead, and started said lettuce, spinach and dill in the house. The lettuce handled this well, the dill and spinach not so well. The dill was too flimsy to withstand being smushed into a flat with a bunch of other 9-packs of seedlings; more often than not I realized I’d accidentally severed one (or more) dill every time I watered them. The spinach, as I’ve said, had dampening off problems, and got fried by an accidental night out in 20 degree weather.

Well, those with more experience can probably already guess where this story is going. In random places, I now have dill, lettuce and spinach popping up in my garden, looking as good or better than my transplants. They didn’t sprout before, because, obviously, they knew about the impending 20 degree weather and figured they’d wait it out underground, thank you very much. I don’t want to pluck them out, but at the same time, they are not in nice, orderly rows. I don’t much care about neat, orderly rows, but as Teman well points out, it makes it a million times eaiser to weed and mulch. If he gets there first, I am sure all my rogue plants will go the same way as the weeds. However, if I weeded/mulched it before he does, then . . .! Not that I would turn down help. On the contrary, if I didn’t like help so much, I would give directives that they all be spared, even though it would be a major pain in the neck. That would spare the odd ones, but would also wear at the good graces of my help, which I also don’t want to do.

Anyway, this year, I’m going to try to see to it that the greens section is prepared in the fall, so I can lay out nice, orderly rows in the early spring, and let nature run its most reasonable course.

It also isn’t fair that even though it says on the seed packet “Plant out as soon as the garden can be tilled” that not all peas can tolerate 23 degree nights. The ground has been ready to be tilled for quite some time, and the peas have been planted for quite some time. At the warning of Weather Underground saying 32 degrees with frost in the colder valleys (which, of course, for us was a 23 degree night, so apparently our valley is colder than the colder valleys), I had covered all my transplanted out lettuce and spinach. Then I looked at the peas, and though, “Nah, they ought to be hardy enough.” That brought to mind rule #36–”When deciding whether or not you ought cover a plant, the only factor is how upset you will be if something gets fried.” Deciding that I would be very upset indeed if all 1 1/2 lbs. of peas got fried by a cold snap, I covered them. But, in the spirit of scientific discovery (and also running out of easily accessible bed sheets), I decided to leave some peas uncovered to see how well they would do. The Lincoln peas didn’t even bat an eye, but the Dakota peas were distinctly upset. Though not killed back to the ground, their leaves sustained quite a bit of frost damage, turning a blotchy white.

I am pleased to announce, however, that lettuce, spinach, broccoli and the like are, at least, hardy to mild frosts (such as low 30s).

I am also pleased to announce that we have a very strong contestant for being added to me Run-Me-Over-With-A-Cement-Truck-And-I’ll-Still-Produce-Abundantly list: Reuben’s Red Lettuce, which I bought from Seed’s of Change. It did wonderful last year, which didn’t surprise me. (All lettuce did wonderful last year.) But, after being left out in a low-20s snap, Reuben’s Red bounced back the quickest and most completely. In starting the 3rd batch, I noticed that Reuben’s Red had the best sprouting ratio of all of the lettuces I was trying (Reuben’s Red, Jericho, Bronze Mignonette, and Sucrine). I have reason to believe that it will produce bountifully, and very tastily, but it would be rather hasty of me to declare it a winner until after harvest. Particularly if we get a drought this summer (we only either get droughts or floods, never in between), which it is beginning to look like we might. After all, there are no longer any geysers in our side lawn, and though it’s been threatening to rain for quite some time, it’s been awhile since we had a good soaking rain. Only time will tell, of course, but I am looking forward to adding a new plant to the roster.

Lastly, I have finally come out of my winter haze, and discovered I am crazy. Why, why, why, why do I have so many tomatoes? I suppose it’s because I lot of them were old seed, last year or later, and so I planted 3 seeds for every one I wanted to sprout, and of course they all sprouted. And being to all-together too tendered-hearted girl that I was, I couldn’t kill any once they sprouted. Well, I did give to two tiniest and weakest ones to Deirdre, the three year old sister, which is almost as good as killing them. In fact, I think they got melted last night in the mild frost. Everyone compliments me on what lovely looking tomatoes they are. I think I started them in the middle of April? Maybe early April? But I’ve got them potted on to 6″ pots now, and they would love to be potted on again, but I don’t have any bigger pots, and I daren’t plant them out till after June 7, and anyway Teman hasn’t dug the tomato section yet. My grandfather asked me how I got them like that, and when I explained that I feed them with a mild fertilizer solution (about a 1/4 tsp. Miracle Grow per gallon of water) every time I water them, he likened it to feeding them cake and ice cream everyday. Well, one has to give one’s tomatoes a fighting chance when one only has about 3 1/2 months of frost free (usually) weather, and I have decided that Wall-o-Water’s are a complete pain. At least, if you have to set them up out of reach of the hose, set them up on slanted ground, and haul water over 100 feet up-hill, etc., etc. So I’ve been setting the tomatoes outside in the sun during the day, and then bringing them in when the temps. get down to about 60. I heard/read that tomatoes are likely to pout if the have to be out in weather lower than 60 degrees.

The amount of flowers that I have also exudes mid-winter madness from every pore. I shall be lucky to fit them all in the garden, and likely be repeatedly called crazy from overly practical brothers who always know better (anyone else have any of those?).

First we must set the stage. . .

After our terrible flooding (for most of which, I was out of state), and subsequent 80 degree weather (for most of which, I was out of state), we settled into one of the most glorious Springs I can remember. We typically do get Spring flooding, and we do typically have several days in April that are in the 80’s, or even break 90’s. But our typical Spring is cold and/or muddy–hence, Mud Season. Then there is one week of Spring, in which all of the trees leaf out, flowers bloom, etc. Sometimes Spring is followed by (or cut short by) a hard freeze, leading to no apple crops, and no lilac blooms. This one week of Spring is followed by Summer. Don’t blink, or you miss Spring.

But this year. . .! The daffodils are just finishing up, and the apple trees haven’t even opened yet! We actually have a Spring this year, with temperatures usually only in the upper 60’s, with that lovely Spring breeze, and plants are taking their turns.

OK, now for the story. I had been hardening off my broccoli, lettuce, spinach, and parsley. I decided to leave it out for the night, as it had finished its daytime hardening off, and all of those plants are supposed to be cold weather plants. A light frost shouldn’t bother them.

And, of course, it chose that one night to dip down to 20 degrees, and it totally fried them all.

Well, most of the lettuce struggled through (it has gotten back on its feet, but it’s been several weeks), but the parsley, spinach and broccoli didn’t make it all. Is the this the end of the story? No. I had already started round two of broccoli, lettuce and spinach. I like to stagger them, partly for harvesting reasons and partly so that I still have enough room under the grow lights. I started round 3 to make up for the death of round one. I carefully hardened off round 2. For their first night out, I checked the forecast online. It said lows in the low 30s, which shouldn’t hurt the plants. But, just in case, I pulled all the seedlings on to the porch where they would be more sheltered.

And it got down to 21 degrees, wilted the lettuce and spinach slightly, and really did a number on the poor broccoli. And at this point it is too late to start a round 4. The lettuce and spinach have bounced back without a problem, and the broccoli is hanging onto life by a thread.

And while all of this is really sad, particularly in the early morning, when it seems like it might be a good idea just to go back to bed, it’s not the worst for me. I should like to blame this all on the fickleness of our weather, and valiantly claim that I did all that could possibly be expected of me, but alas, that’s not true. The saddest, shame-fullest part of the whole story is that it is all my fault.

Not only could have I known better, but I did know better.

Every gardener begins to pick up on some rules that apply to their own little ecosystems. One of the rules for our little valley is that the last frost is never before June 7th. Not even June 6th can be frost free. Anyone who sees the temperatures soaring into the 90’s on June 6th and plants out their tomatoes will be cursing the weather gods on the morning of June 7th as they discover all of their wilted tomatoes. Even if you have been without a frost for 2 1/2 weeks, there is always that one, last frost. Maddening, but consistent. If you know it, and ignore, it’s your own fault.

Another rule for our little ecosystem is that regardless of what the lowest temperature is predicted, it will always be at least 10 degrees colder. And I knew that. In fact, I made that rule up! Nonetheless, at that late hour, I chose to willfully believe the lying weather report instead of what I knew to be true, and I left the plants on the porch.

Woe is me, for I am being punished for my sins!

I could have sour grapes, and say it doesn’t look like it’ll be much of a year for broccoli anyway–too hot and dry. I could grasp at straws, and say I’m sure I will still get some broccoli. I could be an optimist, and say it looks like it will be a good tomato year, I will probably get a record harvest this year. I could look at things honestly, and say no matter what, I’m sure I’ll be canning pickles till my eyes cross. But what do I say?

Too bad for the broccoli. I’ll miss it.