My current favorite winter reading material
What do you do in the winter time? Maybe you go hunting, perhaps a cross country ski weekend, or a day of snow shoeing. It could be that you take saunas, you spend your days baking, or you enjoy a friendly visit to neighbors for coffee. One of my favorite winter activities, when the evenings are long and days are short, is gardening. You read that right – I said “gardening”.
Obviously I don’t spend much time working the soil when our high temp is well below freezing, but what I choose to do instead, is plan the garden and pick through the seed catalogs that start arriving mid-winter. I think that this is just a naturally cathartic activity on cold, dreary days. What could feel better than to think about warm spring days planting or hot summer days eating tomatoes or strawberries fresh from the garden?
This is something I remember so well from my childhood – my great grandma first showed me the Gurney seed catalog when I was probably about four years old. She would tell me about peas and beans, how they grew on trellises; she would talk about cucumbers and ask if I remembered making pickles with her, trying to explain to me why we made pickles; she’d ask me about different fruits and then she’d describe the orchard in her back yard; finally she’d ask me to circle the pictures of vegetables I’d like to grow and eat. Lots of time was spent talking, thinking, and hoping for good crops. My great grandma was a superb gardener and could make plants grow almost by her wish.
This wintertime activity always helped chase away the cabin fever if you’d been shut in by bad weather for a few days. One thing I noticed, though, as I got older is that you can sometimes order seeds just to stave off cabin fever. More than one time, I have done this and then found out that while it worked to cure the cabin fever, I now have much more seed than I could ever hope to grow in my garden spot. I won’t be surprised this year if that happens.
Above, in the picture, you see the catalog of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds – a Missouri company dedicated to help preserve long, lost varieties of food crops. I am not compensated in any way to tell you that this has become one of my favorite seed catalogs simply for the wide variety of foods you can now grow for yourself. You really have to see it to believe it – and you can see it at their website (link).
