Seed catalog mania

The pages are covered with bright color photos of healthy, big, and beautiful landscaping plants. The flowers are vibrant and the trees are perfectly pruned and shaped. Every vegetable is accompanied by a blue ribbon seal of approval and the picture of a smiling child gardener holding his prize for the camera.

Who can resist the ever optimistic seed catalog? Certainly not the women in my family.

The minute the thermometer in the shop reached 60 degrees, my mother started thumbing through the three-foot-high stack of seed catalogs on the chair by the doorway. Once she was done there, Mom would start in on re-reading her gardening magazines, how-to books and every column by Extension horticulturists in the local paper for advice and tips. She'd sit down at the dining room table and make lists, dog-ear pages, and plan her dream landscape.

The thing is, though, rarely did a year go by that her dreams came completely true.

Let's face it, the day-to-day activities of the average farm are rough on landscaping projects if they aren't planned right. Trees and shrubs too close to the gravel lane get trampled by big machinery and overzealous teenage sons with poor driving skills. Gardens tend to attract roaming livestock who are illicitly out of their pens. And, I'd wager chemical drift has killed more than one innocent windbreak planted too close to the field.

But, without fail, Mom would plan and conspire over the seed catalogs. She'd get a gleam in her eye and tell anyone within earshot that this would be the year she'd have a beautiful garden and flowerbeds.

And, without fail, something would happen to dim that gleam just a teeny bit.

Tree saplings would mysteriously end up as yard mulch after a mowing, tomcats would mark territorial boundaries on new lawn furniture, and cow dogs would dig holes in petunia beds.

Mom's vegetable garden, though productive, usually had to be replanted each year after the spring running of the herd bulls. Two-year-old Angus bulls tend to leave a trail of disaster when they roam outside of their pens. It wouldn't have been so bad, but somehow they always seemed to time their travels to occur right after a good soaking rain, and so there would be dinner-plate-sized hoofprints in the garden that would turn an ankle if you weren't watching your step. Inevitably, Dad would get the blame for this little episode and he'd be put into labor re-tilling the soil with the roto-tiller.

The flowerbeds around the house and on our deck and patio weren't safe from catastrophe either. If they weren't the cool shady places for the cow dog to wallow in away from the summer sun, they were molested by the roaming herd of barn cats on the hunt for mice.

One summer Mom got this fabulous idea from one of her helpful books to stick plastic forks in the dirt in the flowerboxes with their tines pointing up to discourage visiting tomcats. The only thing they managed to do was make the yard look like an alien landscape. There is nothing more embarrassing as a teenager than having to explain to your date that no, your family doesn't practice some weird religion around forks, but rather your mother has a cat problem. If you listened carefully, you could hear those tomcats chuckle right along with my date.

Still, Mom never let down her optimism. Year after year she placed her order for trees and bushes and seeds and waited at the mailbox for their delivery. She combed through gardening magazines for tips and advice and tried every suggestion to ban the barn cats from her flowerbeds.

There's something to be said for determination.

And, as much as I hate to admit it, I'm starting to become just like her. I already have two dog-eared seed catalogs in my living room with a list of my landscape plans for the spring next to them. Each day the temperature rises by a degree I get a little more anxious to begin my campaign to rehabilitate my neglected backyard. And, while I don't have to worry about roaming herd bulls here in the city, like Mom, I'm trying to find a way to discourage the neighborhood cats from molesting my flowerbeds.

I'm not sticking forks in the ground, though. I have to draw the line somewhere.

Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached by phone at 620-227-1807 or by e-mail at jlatzke@hpj.com.

1/21/08
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Date: 1/14/08

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