COLD SNAP, then Hope in the Mail

It came today.

The first garden catalog of the New Year with a bonus, my favorite seed catalog.

It’s as if they know exactly what I do daily in the depths of winter: stare out my kitchen window onto a stark blanket of white over barren ground, plot, plan and fantasize about what lies dormant beneath and all the new the green that I might be able to squeeze in come Spring. Once night falls and the yard is dark, I can pore over the catalogs in bed and dream some more.

It’s also as if they know I dug up a full quarter of my backyard last fall to make space for more crops and have been amending the soil with composted vegetation in pre-dug holes even up to this date.

Mind you, I do not live on a huge expanse of land. The “James Homestead” is settled on a 55’ x 125’ lot in a packed-tight little town of 10,000 or so residents. A nice size, mind you, but add the house, the front yard, a back patio, the concrete paths on both sides of the house, the 8-foot-wide beds of perennials and evergreens that ring the backyard, and the suburban requirement that you wastefully grow at least a patch of grass, and your growing space shrinks before your eyes. There’s not a lot of room for suburban farming.

But after last summer’s successes involving seeds, shoots, roots, vines, herbs and (of course) tomatoes, I plan to go whole hog this year. And my four-year-old daughter will have a very enthusiastic hand in it as well.

She selected most of the vegetables and varieties we grew from seed last year, and when you saw the plants and vines heavy with the rainbow fruits of our labor, you could tell. Just about everything we grew came in a color other than the “usual” shade: purple string beans, lemon yellow cucumbers, white eggplants, chartreuse zucchini, Christmas lima beans (green pods, but huge red-striped limas), rainbow Swiss chard, purple basil, plus tomatoes in seemingly every color but red: pink, two shades and sizes yellow, yellow and green striped, two shades and sizes of orange, and dark purple. What I wouldn’t do for a fresh-picked, sweetly acidic Black Russian tomato right now.

With limited space, we grew creatively. Actually, vertically. Once our windowsill seedlings reached a certain height, my daughter and I hit The Home Depot one morning, bought some pre-fab wooden lattice, 8’ stretches of lumber, took it all home, measured, sawed, sanded and nailed four trellises together. She did the measuring and marking with her sidewalk chalk, then hammered right along with me. I then sunk the trellises a foot deep in the ground. Voila! A 5’x 5’ plot grew from 25 square feet of space to well over 80 square feet up, down and around. My daughter could also walk inside the structure, reach up and pick what she wanted to eat, in addition to giggling and hiding inside the thicket of vines with the cats underfoot.

All that fun and produce came to a total cost of $30.14, including shipping from the seed company. The tomatoes alone were worth it per pound produced, but the zucchini nearly ran into tonnage after a while. My freezer boasts numerous Ziploc bags of it, as does my mother’s and mother-in-law’s. Last year’s catalog seeds are still viable, as are those fished on impulse from a “4 for $1” basket at the grocery store. So the beans, cucumbers, greens and most of the tomatoes will be on the menu again this year at no cost other than a little sweat and a lot of laughs in the garden.

We’ll do vertical crops on the trellises this year, too, but with my newly added space, I plan to plant for three seasons, starting in early Spring (maybe sugar snap peas? My daughter loves them) and ending with late Fall crops (I’m thinking cheddar cauliflower and a dwarf variety of cabbage). Radicchio will make an appearance both times.

The real crop production comes during that summer stretch in between. My daughter has already chosen Peruvian blue potatoes and Russian banana fingerling potatoes (that’s a good thing - I’ve been dying to try growing potatoes for a while). She also has her eye on Purple Dragon carrots, which have a dark purple skin and flame orange center. I’m looking at a winter squash or two to preserve with the potatoes over the winter. I know my husband likes butternut, but Zeppelin Delicata sounds good to me as well. It is somewhat smaller, is yellow with green stripes that turn orange after picking, and supposedly keeps very well for winter storage. All the better for when the Depression sets in.

I may be even more ambitious than I originally planned and attempt to grow cardoons, an heirloom Italian vegetable that looks like celery on steroids but tastes like mild artichokes. Cardoons grow on the sides of roads and are foraged in the Old Country, but I have a mind to try and cultivate them myself over here. The $2.95 packet of 100 seeds may well be worth it, considering that cardoons can cost upwards of $2.99 per pound, if you can even find them, and a good bunch easily weighs three pounds.

My husband has already put in his request for SunGold cherry tomatoes again, and some leafy greens in addition to the chard. Although we haven’t yet zeroed in on any new varieties, tomatoes will definitely make a repeat performance this year, as will the crazy climbing zucchini. I want yellow wax beans in addition to the purple pole beans from last year, but I don’t know if there’s a climbing variety.

The seed and garden catalogs will hold all the answers.

Give me a week. The catalogs will be covered in a Technicolor code of hi-liter pen colors for yes, maybe, must-try, climbing and cold weather tolerant. Then I’ll be back at the kitchen window, planning, plotting and awaiting the arrival of my order.