It’s January and time to start planning the crops!  The last of our seed catalogs has arrived and we have to order in the seed to till and plant the back 40. 

Feet, that is.

Talk about transplanting the yuppie view of the world, eh?  We have something like 48 square feet of garden all ‘sitting pretty’ in the planters I built and, counting all three seed and garden catalogs that have arrived so far,we have approximately 250 square feet of fancy-coloured printed page!  That’s right…….5 square feet of glossy catalog for every square foot of garden.  I call that the yuppie ratio.  Magazine space vs the real thing.  The YR shows up in Lee valley catalogs, too.  I have almost enough LV catalogs to build an Adirondack deck chair.  

Given our pathetic gardening track record there is no way we can justify taking a tree to make the paper to publish the catalog to make us buy the seeds that grow virtually nothing edible but Marigolds and the squash from Hell.

It ain’t easy being green and a hip consumer but Lee Valley and Versey Seeds are trying to bridge the gap for us all.  And I am having to build another gardening box this year in an effort to justify their work.  To me, this is just an exercise in exercise. 

Sally is hooked, however.  She poured over the latest seed catalog from West Coast seed reading the write-ups on turnips, vintage grape strains, multi-hued tomatoes and heritage apples and pears conveniently ignoring the fact that we are located on solid granite and any  apple trees grown in raised planters produce very little in the way of pie filling.

“Oooh, I think we should plant spinach and kale this year.  What do you think?”  

“Well, we grew kale last year and fed it all to the dogs.  We also grew Marigolds that grew like billy-o and we didn’t eat any – but they were at least very pretty.  And let us not forget the squash from the little shop of horrors that we not only didn’t eat, we were afraid to make angry!  And then there was the half ton of green tomatoes that covered the living room for a week waiting to ripen that, come to think of it, I have not seen hide nor hair of since.”

“Yeah.  We have to pick more carefully this time, I guess. I was just surprised that anything grew at all.  It was so much fun!”

I love her attitude.  But it is not a reality-based view from behind those beautiful eyes.  She sees the garden of Eden.  I see a box not much larger than a coffin………beckoning.  Our visions conflict.  I suspect that we’ll have a ‘mixed salad’ of things that we toil over and yet our diet will change very little.  It is Save-on based if you must know.  We’ll buy organic, of course, and be sure to get our produce from within 100 miles but somehow not very much will come from within the nearest 100 feet.   Of that, I am pretty sure.

Maybe some squash. 

The Marigolds, however, will grace the table almost all year and for that alone, it is all worth it.