I spent about an hour looking through the new Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog and made some quick notes and started my wish list.  Below are some of the things I wrote down.  If you’d like to get your own Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog, visit their website here or call them at 207-926-3400.

• When I get a new seed catalog, I like to read it cover to cover if time permits so that means I start on the inside cover page.  I found it very refreshing that the folks at Pinetree recommend people to fellow Maine seed suppliers Fedco Seeds and Johnny’s Selected Seeds if you need large quantities.  You won’t see Burpee recommending you go to someone else for something special.  A big green thumbs up to Pinetree for this.
• Lulu the cat makes only one appearance in this catalog that I saw, on page 2 being held by Sally.  She was on the cover last year.
• Wish list item: White Albino Beets on page 8 ($1.50)  Just curious about a white beet and whether I can get great beet taste without ruining all my kitchen towels with red stain.
• Wish list item:  Gourds of all kinds from pages 15 and 16.  I’m particularly fond of the goblin eggs.
• Wish list item:  Pumpkins of all kinds from pages 24 and 25 and the pumpkin decorating book by Vicki Rhodes with a nice price of $2.99.
• Wish list item: Hailstone radish (.95 – no that is not a typo) on page 25.  Just sounds neat.
• A must try tomato – Matt’s Wild Cherry ($1.50) on page 32.  I have been growing these small cherry tomatoes since my very first garden and they are by far my favorite.  The seeds are hard to locate some years, but I was happy to see Pinetree added them for this year.  The thing is, these plants are so wild and prolific that they will self sow year after year.  All I do is dig up a cup full of soil where the overripe fruit has falled and use that to sprout next year’s plants.  Believe me plenty of seeds will germinate.  Plus you will also get many rogue plants in your garden to.  Funny how the ones in the garden (without all that indoor starting) fruit at the very same time the pampered ones do.  Makes you wonder why you go to the trouble?
• Wish list:  Cutting celery ($1.15) page 39.  I have tried many times to grow this and have only ever had two plants survive.  Anybody have any suggestions on how to get this stuff to stay alive past the transplanting stage?  Peat pots maybe?
• Wish list:  Pineapple Tomatillo ($1.10) on page 44.  We grew this once before but didn’t have time to process the fruit so we’d like to try again.  We found ours tasted more like strawberries than pineapple, but they were tasty.

Enough dreaming for now, more items of interest later including a first for me – tobacco.  Never saw it offered before.

Catalog cover

I was surprised to see our new Pinetree Garden Seeds Catalog in the mailbox yesterday since it is only November, but there it was.  (Actually there were two of them, we seem to be getting doubles – have to email them about that.)

Pinetree is our favorite seed supplier since they offer a lot of varieties in smaller packets with smaller prices and they are a smaller company and friendly to deal with.  We don’t have a large garden so getting tons of seeds is just wasteful – and expensive.

The garden for 2009 did not fare particularly well for many reasons including too much rain, an overactive young groundhog (affectionately called Whistle Pig) and a new baby in the house.  As all gardeners do, we hope next year will be better.

We are changing our focus to having an educational garden as opposed to one that is growing lots of food.  With two children under 2 we just don’t have the time to devote to harvesting and putting lots of food by.  If we decide we want to do some of that, the local Farmer’s market provides tons of fresh produce at good prices for us.

Instead I hope to grow new varieties and try my hand at containers since those can be moved outside Whistle Pig’s reach.  (Yeah, we could do him in, but why?  He’s cute, we aren’t living off our garden and he kicked out the resident large snake  that kept startling us… so we kinda owe him.)  Our plans are in place for moving to a new location in the next few years so we don’t want to drop tons of money into this garden knowing we’ll move, but it is still a place to learn about plants we’d like to grow at the next place.

We also have TONS of seeds left over from last year so I’m going to see what we can salvage of those and limit new purchases this year, though I think we’re going to do large plantings of pumpkins, gourds and sunflowers in our field.  We enjoy growing all of these, though we have mildew problems with the pumpkins and gourds.  Hopefully the new location in the field will be better for them.

Stay tuned for highlights from Pinetree’s catalog.

This is just a friendly reminder that we are moving into fall and if you live in an area threatened by heavy forsts and snow that you should mulch your strawberry crowns to help them survive the coming cold.  Four inches of clean straw has helped ours survive last winter, which included a few days that dipped down to 0.  ’08-’09 was a record year for the number of days below freezing.  I lost count at over 40.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the winters here are what I consider mild for a temperate climate: we only experience a couple of days where temperatures dip to 0 or  below over night, with only a month where temps stay at or below freezing.  Usually if we get a couple of inches of snow, it doesn’t stick around for more than a week, except in the shadows cast by the house and trees.