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Top 10 Seed and Plant Catalogs for New England

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The ground in my part of New England is blanketed in snow, and will remain so for most of the next 3 months. The temperature ranges from cold to frigid. It is hard to think of spring, but now is the time when the garden planning begins, when I start making lists of plants to buy, drawing plot diagrams, calculating sowing times, and anticipating, in my mind, the eventual blooms of summer and the harvest of next fall.

This is also the time when my mailbox fills up with catalogs from plantsmen and nurseries, offering new plant cultivars, rediscovered heirloom varieties and all manner of new garden gadgets.  When possible I prefer to support local nurseries.  Their plants are chosen to be well-adapted for my regional conditions.  Of course, the downside is that if you buy locally, then you’ll be buying the same plants as your neighbors, and who wants to have their landscaping look the same as everyone else on the street?

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Of the dozens of seed and plant catalogs I receive every winter, there are a few that I return to year after year, the ones where I find the immense variety I crave,  as well as high quality service.  The following is my “top 10 list” of seed and plant catalogs suitable for New England:

  1. Fedco Seeds (Maine)   Their new 137 page catalog covers seeds, tubers and organic growing supplies.  The emphasis is on hardy and short-season varieties suitable for northern gardens.
  2. Nourse Farms (Massachusetts) Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries live plants, including new introductions.  They are my first choice for berries.
  3. Territorial Seed Company (Oregon)  Very informative catalog, 167 pages, should be a model for others.  Clearly indicates which seeds are open pollinated, which are F1 hybrids, which are organic, disease resistance, days to maturity, etc.   Most seeds are available in different packet sizes, ranging from small samplers to larger packets for small commercial growers.
  4. Artistic Gardens / Le Jardin du Gourmet (Vermont)   Their 50 Sample Herb Packet Special is a regular annual purchase for me.  At any other seed company you pay $3 or so for a packet containing enough basil seeds for a pesto factory.  Total overkill for a small garden, and expensive if you want to plant a wide variety of herbs.   But for a very reasonable price Le Jardin du Gourmet offers a bundle of  50 herb seed packets, each very small, but providing “just enough” seeds for my small garden.  You have no control over the variety, so if you absolutely must have Genovese Basil, this is not for you, but in turn for giving up control over the variety you get large selection of culinary and traditional medicinal herbs for a very reasonable price.  I find it also gets me to grow herbs I might not otherwise try, like lovage or horehound.
  5. Seed Savers Exchange (Iowa) This is the open source project of the seed world.  Individual amateur gardeners and small farms preserving 12,613 varieties of heirloom, ethnic and unique vegetable varieties, growing from seed, and harvesting and preserving the seed to pass on to the next year.  The resulting huge diversity of seeds are shared with members for the cost of postage. The variety is staggering.  If they don’t have it,  it probably doesn’t exist (or is protected by a plant patent).  A subset of the most popular heirloom varieties is for sale on their website, but to get the full phonebook-thick catalog of member-offered seeds, you need to join.
  6. White Flower Farm (Connecticut)  The catalog, fully photographed in luscious detail, is a feast for the eyes.  Strong on perennials (herbaceous and woody) and bulbs.  I use it as much to generate ideas as I do for ordering.
  7. Johnny’s Selected Seeds (Maine)  I go to Johnny’s especially for their new vegetable variety introductions.  For example, they introduced “Bright Lights” Swiss chard, one of my favorites.   Their catalog always has something new to look forward to.
  8. Raintree Nursery (Washington) If you want something unusual in the fruit department, this is where to go.  From medlars to hardy kiwi to saskatoons, they have it.  Their catalog has also the cultural information you need to be successful, including recommendations on compatible pollinators.
  9. Bluestone Perennials (Ohio) Along with the White Flower Farm catalog, this is my main source for perennials.  The PlantFinder search engine on their website is great for finding plants for a special niche, like “Zone 6 hardy, deer resistant groundcovers with blue flowers”.
  10. Totally Tomato (Wisconsin)  The name says it all.  If you want a specific tomato variety and no substitute will do, this is the place to go.  For example, their catalog lists 41 different cherry tomato varieties.  This is the “long tail” of the lycopersicum world.

Project BudBurst

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Drift of Crocuses

The crocuses have bloomed here in Westford, one of first four flowers of my spring garden, the others being Galanthus nivalis (Snowdrops), Iris reticulata (dwarf Iris) and Eranthis hyemalis (Winter Aconite). But the crocuses are the most noticeable, since I have naturalized them in small drifts over the lawn.

For a few years I’ve been keeping a garden journal and have recorded the dates of first bloom for various flowers. So I see that for the snowdrops, the first bloom was March 14th this year, March 26th in 2008 and March 24th in 2007. Is this global warming? From just three observations, there is no way of telling.

But what if we had thousands of people record such information all over the country and pool their observations? Then we might be able to observe some interesting patterns. That is the idea of Project BudBurst, a distributed public field study run by a group of researches from UCAR, the Chicago Botanic Garden and the College of Forestry and Conservation of University of Montana. You sign up for a free account, state your location (US only, sorry) and pick from a list of local plant species that you can observe.

The emphasis is on widespread, native species, so the exotic bulbs I have in my garden won’t be of use. But I can report observations on things like dandelions or white pines. Depending on the type of plant, you report the date it reaches each of various “phenophases” such as first flower, fully flowering, pollen release, first ripe fruit, etc. Different types of plants will have different phenophases. Volunteers enter their observations which are then plotted, along with all the other data on Google Maps.

Aside from climate change research, I wonder if this might also be useful for predicting the onset of spring allergies?

Berry Good, Berry Bad

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It has been an interesting Spring here in Westford, weather-wise. April dipped below freezing on the 3rd, 8th, 9th, 15th and 16th. Then we got a warm spell, a week of days that reached 75 °F (23 °C) and even one day that reached 87.4 °F (30.8 °C) (April 23rd). Then it struck, on May 1st, an overnight low of 28.7 °F (-1.8 °C).

The vulnerability, when a late frost like this occurs, is in bud development. If the plant, by warm sunny days, has been tricked into bud development, and then a freeze occurs, the bud will be injured or killed. Strawberries are particularly prone to this problem.

Because of interactions of thermal inversions at the ground, humidity levels, etc., a simple temperature reading is not an accurate indicator of whether damage actually occurred. For example, if humidity is high, the temperature can dip to freezing, but in the act of freezing water vapor (creating frost) energy is released (latent heat of fusion, as the chemists call it). So you have a few degrees of tolerance if humidity is high, if you have a fog, etc. In fact, commercial strawberry growers will handle this problem by running sprinklers when a freeze threatens, to increase the amount of water around the plants available to freeze, as a buffer to protect the plants. Every degree helps.

But I wasn’t so lucky. The extent of damage was not clear until the strawberry plants started blooming this week. Here’s what I am seeing.

A healthy strawberry blossom

Above is an example of a normal, healthy strawberry blossom. You see the ring of stamens, the male organs of the flower, each with a filament stalk tipped with an anther containing the pollen. In the center is the receptacle with the many carpels, which are the female side of the equation.

But in the picture below, we see a blossom from my garden that shows injury. Although the plant is sound, and it did flower, the carpels are dead. This blossom will not yield a berry.

From the looks of it, 40-50% of buds are damaged in this way. So no strawberry wine this year. I’ll only have enough for fresh eating and ice cream.

A strawberry flower that has suffered frost damage

Pruning Raspberries

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The earth does not yield up her sweet fruits unrecompensed. For every berry I will harvest in September, I pay now an equal measure of sweat and blood. Hunched down and with thick gloves, I navigate the thicket of thorny bramble canes, the red raspberries, yellow raspberries, purple raspberries, blackberries, thimble berries and field berries, and restore man’s order to nature’s chaos.

The correct way to prune brambles depends on their variety, whether they are primocane-bearing, or floricane-bearing. Many raspberries, and all blackberries, are floricane-bearing, meaning they have a two-year cycle, where the canes that grow this year (the primocanes) will flower and bear fruit next year (when they will be called floricanes). The primocane-bearing varieties, on the other hand, bear fruit on this year’s canes. I like having a mix, since that spreads out the harvest.

The floricane-bearing varieties, since they started their growth last year, will bear fruit in the summer, while the primocane-bearing varieties, which need to complete their growth in a single year, will bear fruit later, in the fall. Primocane-bearing varieties are cut to the ground after harvest. The maintenance of floricane-bearing varieties is a little more complicated. The floricanes are removed after harvest, and the primocanes, which will be next year’s floricanes, are pruned and thinned while the plant in dormancy, late winter, which is the work I was able to complete before this last snowstorm.

Pruning of brambles will consider several factors:

  1. The architecture of the plant. A bush full of large berries will have considerable weight. One option is to trellis the plants to support that weight. Another option, which I prefer, is to maintain the canes and side branches at a length where the plant can be self-supporting, 4-5 feet tall, side branches trimmed to 8-12 inches.
  2. Cane density. It is better to have 3-5 thick, strong canes per linear foot than to have 15 smaller ones. The goal in the end is to have a bounty of fruit, not foliage. So now is the time to thin the canes.
  3. Access for sun, rain, air and me. This is another reason to thin the canes. A big dense mass of canes competing for limited resources will produce poorly, be susceptible to mold, and will be difficult to harvest.

The question can fairly be asked, “Why go through all this trouble? Why not let the invisible hand of nature guide the development of the brambles? Let her decide. She will pick the winners and losers.”

To that I respond, that nature, in her infinite wisdom, does not seem to care much for bringing me berries. I am not absolutely certain what role brambles play in the grand scheme of things, but if I had to guess, nature likes them to form wild, uncontrolled, dense masses of thorny canes, with berries inaccessible to larger mammals. That seems to be their natural tendency in my garden. However, in their natural state, the brambles thicket forms an ideal protective habitat for small birds, who can remain protected from predators while eating the berries. The berry seeds survive unharmed by the digestive system of the birds and are excreted, with fertilizer, in distant locations, leading to the better propagation of the species.

And so I battle the genes inside the berries, pitting my labors against nature’s disordered fecundity. It breaks the back and scrapes the skin, but it must be done again each year, around this time.

Fruits of the Season: Notes on my Berry Patch

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It was a good year for my berries. I have a 400 square-foot “berry patch”, half of it for the Fragaria genus (Strawberries, Alpine Strawberries, Musk Strawberries) and half for the Rubus genus (Raspberries, Blackberries, Thimbleberries and the various crosses such as the Tayberry and Loganberry).

The strawberry harvest in June went well in spite of the unusually persistent wet weather we had in May. I normally try to garden organically, but with that amount of moisture coming after bloom, the conditions for Botrytis (grey mold) were too good, so I had to spray a couple times with Captan. In the end we had far more berries than we could eat, so I was able to take 10 pounds of fresh berries and made a few gallons of wine. This is cellaring now, along with the raspberry mead I started last fall, and a gallon of an herbal wine (spearmint, pepermint and lemon balm in a 2:2:1 ratio). I’ve never made an herbal wine before and the ingredients were improvised based on what had a pleasing smell in the herb garden at the time. So there is a non-zero chance that I will end up with a gallon of homemade mint mouthwash.

I’ve been picking the raspberries for around a month now. I have the usual red varieties as well as some yellow and black. My wife refuses to sacrifice any of these to my wine making exploits this year. I will comply with her wishes, but I do hope to be rewarded with a pie in return for my benevolence.

Last year I started another bed, this dedicated to members of the Vaccinium genus (Highbush Blueberries, Wild Lowbush Blueberries, Bilberries, Cranberries, Lingonberries and Everygreen Huckleberries). These all share a common need for acidic soil, so it makes sense to group them together. Since this bed is only a year old, the fruiting was negligible.

I’d love also to plant some Ribes genus plants (Gooseberries, Currants) but these are illegal to grow in Massachusetts. This is an argicultural restriction put in place back in the 1920’s to prevent the spread of Pine Blister Rust, a serious and deadly disease of White Pines. The organism that causes Blister Rust does not spread directly from Pine tree to Pine tree but only via the intermediary of a Gooseberry or Currant plant where it completes part of its lifecycle. So when the government wanted to eliminate Blister Rust, they banned Ribes and so I have no Currants.

I also have various other berries and small fruit that don’t fall into the above categories, including:

  • A Medlar tree
  • A Pin Cherry tree (hope to make some wine from the fruit this year)
  • Grapes (American Vitis labrusca “Fox” grapes, like Concord, Mars and Remailly)
  • Serviceberry
  • Honeyberry (Lonicera Kamchatika — native to Siberia)
  • Elderberry

Some good sources of berry plants that I’ve used include Nourse Farms here in Massachusetts and Raintree Nursery in Washington state.

Good books for the home berry grower include:

For New England growers, a subscription to the UMass Berry Notes newsletter is a must. Although it is targetted to the commercial grower, most of the information is applicable to the home grower as well.