Is it too early?

 

Is it too early to start looking at seed catalogs?

Not on your life. Everybody needs a summer “fix” this time of the year.

I appreciate winter’s beauty as much as the most enthusiastic ice fishing aficionado, but tonight I’m seeing patches of yelloworange nasturtiums and lacy green carrot tops—on an online seed catalog that fills my computer screen.

Right now I’m looking, but soon my fingers will be tapping the keyboard ordering next summer’s garden.

My favorite catalog is from Seed Saver’s Exchange, an organization that saves and shares heirloom seeds, and I like that, so for the past few years I have been ordering its products. Call me old fashioned but I feel better throwing non-genetically modified seeds into my garden dirt.

Seed Savers Exchange began in 1975 with morning glory and pink tomato seeds given to its founders by their grandfather whose parents brought them from Bavaria to Iowa in the 1870s. Currently this organization operates from an 800-acre farm near Decorah, Iowa, and the variety of their seeds is fascinating.

According to the criteria on this website (and I’ve checked out a few others) I have a collection of at least one heirloom seed—bachelor buttons given to me by my two favorite aunts in the late 1970s. I can’t authenticate that they were passed down from my grandmother, but my aunts weren’t prone to wasting money and always harvested the seeds from their garden, so I think I have a pretty good case.

The problem is that my supply is very small. These hearty blue blooms reseeded abundantly for several years but began a slow and unnoticed decline. It wasn’t until last September that I detected only a few lingering plants huddled against the garden corner. Grabbing a tissue from my pocket I knocked the few remaining seeds on its surface, carefully folded the tissue and placed it in my pocket.

Feeling like I had almost squandered buried treasure, I wrapped tape around the precious packet and stored it with my garden supplies where it waits for me to unwrap and plant next summer. My fingers are crossed. If the seeds don’t make it, Seed Savers’ Exchange sells heirloom “Blue Boy” bachelor buttons, but it won’t be the same.

My other contribution to an heirloom seed collection is a little more “iffy”—pink poppy seeds. Back in the 1970s, these lovely flowers grew at my mother-in-law’s doorstep. She claimed they came from the tops of poppy seed buns, and since they were beautiful, I planted them around my house.

They grew lavishly. People asked me for seeds and soon the pink poppies filled many a Cook County garden. Unfortunately, they eventually also died out and weren’t revived again until I mentioned them in a 2004 column. Carolyn Larsen read the column and recognized the same flowers growing her yard. She resupplied me with seeds and I now have a Ziploc filled with them.

The promise of summer and gardens, and especially the idea of my tiny “heirloom” seed collection, fill my imagination as I look through the garden catalog, and I make a resolution to write a follow-up column next August.

Will the bachelor button seeds survive, and how will the pink poppies fare?