Years ago, when my children were young, a peculiar Christmas tradition was started. After the presents were all opened and things quieted down, my older daughter Isabelle and I opened the new seed catalogs. We lived on a farm then, a farm that was lost in the flood of 1993. Let's not speak of that heartbreak.
We gathered all our seed packets around us, in front of the wood stove, and made gardening plans. We checked our notebooks for previous planting successes, if any. With a 90 by 90 foot garden of fabulous loam enriched by goat manure and straw bedding, it was hard to be restrained. It was slightly more than a grandiose idea, which resulted in canning and freezing enough to feed many families for a couple of years.
One year, we were especially profligate with the tomato starts, speaking of a dozen of this and that variety, until we wound up putting in eighty plants for our family of five.
We were to learn that being comfortable in front of the fire turned out to be a lot different than weeding in the blazing summer sun. This lesson is forgotten annually.
Izzy is a mom now and we each have our gardens. She was the only one of my three children to inherit the unfortunate addictive gardening gene. My other daughter, Lissa, and my son Chris cannot stand the smell of cooking tomatoes.
The seed catalog project starts for me on Christmas Day and continues unabated for an indefinite time, during which I fill out orders and stick Post-Its on pages. Even though I won't start any seeds until February at the earliest, it is a very important time for me. I must not be alone, because that's when they send the catalogs.
