Posted by Heather Harris





Christmas is over, it's freezing outside, and I have successfully reorganized every cobwebby corner of my entire house until there is literally nothing left for me and my bouncing, hollering children to do this winter break except bounce and holler. My dad was over last night talking about his Norwegian ancestors that came through Ellis Island and headed west to Montana to live in a cabin smaller than my living room with thirteen of their closest family members. All I could think of was some poor mother with a half dozen kids trapped inside the cabin for six long months because their fingers would snap off if they went outside. Seriously, it is not starvation that threatened those children during those dark Montana winters ... I sunk down on the couch, asking my Ninja-turtle shelled son to "quiet down" for the twenty-fifth time, lazily looked around the living room that would have housed an entire farm family and then I noticed it. Artfully tucked beneath one of my vegetable gardening books was the three hundred and fifty-four page seed catalog my mother and father-in-law had given me for Christmas. Yes, this a catalog worth gifting. I had stowed it away in my cleaning frenzy and completely forgotten about it. I darted across the room, greedily snatched it from the shelf and dove back onto the couch knocking three matchbox cars and a cat out of my way.I pried back the pages, promising myself to read the farmer's note and essays before peeking at the vegetables when two children catapulted off the back of the couch from out of nowhere and landed on either side of me beginning a long interrogation about every detail of the page in front of me. "What's that?" "A cactus"."Who's he?" "Joe". "What's he doing?" "Looking for edible plants all over the world"."Why?" "He's a botanical explorer". "What's that?" "A person who looks for plants all over the world." "Why?" "Because they want to find things no one has seen before." "No one had ever seen that cactus?" "Well the people who live by the cactus have seen it, but not us." "Oh... What's that?" I answered the first twenty nine questions and then threatened to send them outside if they didn't find something to do. It worked! And it's a good thing because the catalog is x-rated. It is essentially vegetable pornography. From the title, "TheSeed Catalog" to the whirling kernels on the cover fanned out like a french can-can dancer skirt, to the full-color glossy photographs of the most tantalizing, exotic vegetables curated from every corner of the earth, the entire book is a testament to what the herbaceous world has to offer that most likely will never cross your path, even if you plant it. Even the melon the Italians call, "Brutto ma Buono" (Ugly but good) looks somehow sexy in all its warty. leperous glory. It is a very dangerous catalog. It has me re-contemplating ideas long dead: Maybe I can grow a melon. Who says I can't start my entire garden from seed? Picking a vegetable solely because of its romantic name is perfectly sensible. I'm looking at youIt also doesn't help that these are all heritage seeds, which like fathers, come with charming histories about how their ancestors saved them up on a shelf in a small cabin with 13 kids who managed not to break the little glass jar as they played indoor hockey every day of that crazy Montana winter in `06. It is utterly irresistible. I can't tell you how many seeds I have underlined. It's embarrassing.Of course this can only end badly. I already know that disappointment is looming at my sliding glass door come spring time, even as I salivate over the retouched images of shishito peppers, scarlet kale, and Cambodian eggplants. But dang it, a girl can dream. And I need my own story to pass down to the generations, so maybe my accidental cross pollination of a fungo squash with a vulcan chard will create some enchanting new variety and I can make up my own romantic name like "Mr. Knightly" or "Fitzwilliam Darcy". That will definitely sell. Especially when I explain how its seed was saved from the clutches of a four foot Ninja Turtle one long, cold winter in '15.