It’s back: that seedy feeling

My first seed catalog of 2025 arrived in late November. The timing couldn’t have been better. Thanksgiving sticks a fork into the growing season and ushers in a quiet time of rest, contemplation, hot beverages and heavy reading.

Gardening is a thoughtful pursuit, and seed catalogs are a way to garden in your mind during the winter. The tantalizing descriptions and flattering depictions of diverse plants can offer dreams where reality falls short and inspire ambitious plans, some of them realistic.

There’s a seed catalog to match every gardener these days, from latte-sipping community garden plot workers to leather-handed cowgirls. There’s the whimsical nostalgia of the Fedco catalog, with its line-drawn illustrations of a garden world populated by sunbathing onions and gnomes hiding behind lovage plants. Many market growers prefer the no-nonsense approach of Johnny’s Selected Seeds, which is streamlined and farmer-oriented, with the fastest delivery in the business.

If those two catalogs mated, their spawn would resemble the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog that arrived in November. It has that old-timey feel of Fedco mixed with the budding entrepreneurism of Johnny’s, and it adds a mission to discover and share as many heirloom plant varieties and traits as it can. 

The Baker Creek catalog includes an ad for its larger and more comprehensive cousin, the Whole Seed Catalog. It’s like a normal seed catalog on plant-based steroids, with information on more than 1,200 varieties of heirloom seeds, along with historical notes, cultivation tips and many seeds for thought. I picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble.

Jere Gettle founded Baker Creek Seeds in the Missouri Ozarks in 1998. He has an elfin look, like a character from the Fedco catalog, and is partial to plants that attract pollinators.

I asked him about some out-of-stock Peruvian maíz morado corn, which grows more than 8 feet tall and produces long ears of shiny black kernels. It will be in stock by mid-January, Gettle assured me.

I will be placing my Inca corn order then, as well as some others. Everyone in my family has marked a few pages, flagging items such as dragon tongue beans, muncher cucumbers, Minnesota midget melons and today’s featured seed, King Tut purple peas.

The origin of King Tut purple peas is hotly debated, with candidates in the United Kingdom, Egypt and Everett, Washington. Two things everyone can agree on are that this purple pea has been around for a long time and is delicious. The pods are edible if you want the extra anthocyanins, but they’re not fleshy and juicy like a snap pea pod. The peas themselves are gargantuan green spheres that seem to burst from the pods and are the real treasures here. Whether you want to make a thick pea soup or just infuse some green into whatever you’re cooking, these verdant orbs work well with almost any dish.

My farmer friend Patti once taught me a cool trick for using peas to gauge how ready the garden is for planting. She sows peas as soon as the ground thaws. Every few days, she plants a few more and keeps planting them until they start to sprout and grow. That’s her green light to begin planting a bunch of other seeds and seedlings.

Be they for pink celery, yellow tomatillos, red melon, green spinach or blue kale, an order of seeds is like a box of Lucky Charms but with more fiber. Seeds offer colorful winter dreams — and the possibility that they might even come true.