Group of seed catalogs from a variety of companies advertising their products for 2021. Shutterstock
In years past, I waited until the new year to place orders with the Maine-based seed companies. That stopped when so many companies started offering discounts for early orders.
For example, we placed our Pinetree Garden Seeds order the Sunday before Thanksgiving because they were having a 20 percent off sale and will have placed other orders by the time this column is published.
The catalogs are a pleasure to read in the cold winter months, even if you aren't planning to order anything.
FEDCO, based in Clinton, sends out two catalogs, one for seeds and supplies and the other for trees, shrubs and perennials. I had to look this up, and I wonder why it took me so long to do this: FEDCO stands for Federation of Cooperatives, back when the business also operated a food co-op in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Both catalogs are black and white on non-glossy paper, but packed with information. Last year FEDCO stopped selling seeds from Syngenta because of the corporation's manufacturing of toxic agricultural chemicals.
Customer reaction, buyers are told, has been positive.
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As a dedicated potato grower - both because I like them and because they are fairly easy to grow - I was pleased to see five new seed-potato collections: For making potato chips, Maine classics, with blue flesh, new varieties and for growing in containers. They would be fun for a potato lover with limited gardening space.
It also includes planting guides for vegetables, herbs and flowers, and is entirely user-friendly.
The Trees, Shrubs and Perennials catalog has had to make some adjustments to its tree-storage facility because of climate change: "After 40 years of relying on increasingly unreliable cold winters to cool our shop, we had to say uncle."
That catalog is where we ordered trees to replace pines we cut down at camp after one big pine fell during a wind storm and destroyed the porch.
Although we made an order from Pinetree in November, we probably will make another order before spring when we discover what we missed in our first order. Pinetree, in New Gloucester, is dedicated to home gardeners, offering smaller packets of seeds for people who want to try just a little bit of something and don't want to be bothered with trying to save leftover seeds.
The introduction notes that they have 142 new products and have lowered shipping costs.
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Pinetree Lettuce Mix is my go-to lettuce, and I plant it in a cold frame about every three weeks, removing the clear top in early May. Without that protection, woodchucks would eat the produce before we did. I was tempted by a new Wild Garden Mix, which has more and more diverse varieties including some head-lettuce, but I might try that later.
The catalog includes a small picture of a container beside all the varieties that work best for containers, as well as marks for new varieties and those that are organic.
Wood Prairie Farm, owned by the Gerritsen family in the Aroostook County town of Bridgewater, specializes in potatoes - both as seed for home and commercial gardeners and to eat.
A new variety this year is Sarpo Una, brought in from the Sarpo family in Hungary. It has rosy skin and waxy white flesh and is supposed to be tasty and high yielding.
Another new variety is ND Aroostook Red, which was bred and developed at the Aroostook Farm Potato Experiment Station in Maine as well as in North Dakota. It has red skin that maintains its color in storage and white flesh.
Two potato collections are offered for home gardeners who want a variety but don't have much room. The Red White and Blue collection has Dark Red Norland, King Henry and Adirondack Blue to create a 10-foot row.
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The high-yielding Mountaineer collection has tall-growing varieties Baltic Rose, Sarpo Miro and Huckleberry Gold for 12 hills of potatoes.
Although Wood Prairie specializes in potatoes, it also sells organic seeds for other vegetables and flowers.
Johnny's Selected Seeds in Winslow is Maine's best-known seed company, more than 50 years old and employee-owned for 10 years. Ten of its seed selections have won All-America Selections awards over the years. The company is innovative, with a worldwide reputation for quality.
It has more than 150 new offerings this year, including a new lime-green snacking cucumber called Gimlet, that looks attractive and interesting.
Troubadour XR is a new variety of corn that is disease-resistant, with large ears, and has good sweetness and flavor.
I just skimmed the catalogs for their highlights to write this column. Serious reading will begin in January.
Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com.
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