GROWING Joy

Gardening yields endless rewards, from first sprouts to final harvest, and then the best part: sharing the bounty 

- Ross Gay

It's that time of year again. I'm sitting in front of the fire, looking through a small stack of seed catalogs from High Mowing Organic Seeds, Seed Savers Exchange, The Maine Potato Lady. Today, though, I am loving the Fedco catalog because it is printed on newsprint, with the veggies and fruit depicted not with photographs but with beautiful and sometimes goofy drawings. One is an excellent rendering of someone drawing back a bow and arrow, except the arrow is a pod of peas. In another, some pumpkin-shaped people are admiring a pumpkin. A couple of leaves of the dinosaur kale are cute, happy baby dinosaurs. That kind of thing.

There is no greater sucker for seeds than me. When I flip through these pages of photos and drawings and descriptions, I start dreaming. Oh my, Chicago callaloo. Look how big these leaves are! Wait, hold up, black peanuts? I wonder how they'd do in Indiana. Uh-oh, orange watermelons. It goes on and on, for the enticements are legion, and often irresistible, and it makes me think the seed catalog, though an expression of consumer culture, must be among the very most beneficent.

And then I start filling up my cart: two of this; three of that; 5 pounds of elephant garlic, where 3 would more than do. Four packs of butter beans. Oh, they have those Italian redstemmed dandelions: five of those.

If it were almost anything else, I would say to myself, as my mother occasionally did when I was a kid and had heaped up a mountain of fried potatoes or spaghetti on my plate, "Rossy, I think your eyes might be bigger than your stomach." By which I mean our city lot is precisely a 10th of an acre, and I just bought enough seed Hang on. They have shallots? Gotta get a couple pounds of those!... to plant an acre. Maybe 2 or 3.