Jane Powers GardensIt's time to get the catalogues out and dream of planting
Even though I've sown seeds every year for three decades I'm still flushed with foolish optimism every time I open a seed catalogue. At this stage in my gardening life, you'd think I'd have more realistic expectations about the season ahead. But no, I'm a helpless believer in the maxim that is engraved on all gardeners' hearts: "this year will be different".
This year (I can feel it in my bones) every seed I sow will germinate punctually, and put on exactly the right amount of leaves, buds, and roots, before going on to do the job that is required of it. And the weather - of course - will behave beautifully, producing measured doses of sunshine and showers (the latter mainly at night, and never on weekends).
Despite this annual dose of insane sanguinity, I have learned the teeniest bit of sense over the years: I no longer make things hard for myself. So, I don't grow tricky plants that are difficult to germinate, or that require loads of attention. If a plant variety is vulnerable to pests, diseases, inclement weather or gardeners, I don't grow it. And when a plant has been bred specifically to resist any or all of the above, I'm keen to try it. Painted Mountain corn, for instance, was bred in Montana for a short growing season, and is both cold hardy and drought-tolerant. It's the prettiest corn in the world, with kernels ranging from yellow and white, through orange and red, to maroon and black. It's really a flour corn, but it can be eaten fresh too, although I imagine it's not as sugary as most yellow sweetcorn. The excellently-named Brown Envelope Seeds in Skibbereen offers it, and as with all the company's stock, the seed is organic and grown in west Cork.
There is much of interest in this year's catalogue, including Red Centiflor and Yellow Centiflor tomatoes from Oregon. These cherry tomatoes are remarkably blight resistant, and last year (the non-summer, remember?), they cropped well into autumn, according to Brown Envelope's Madeline McKeever. Also from Oregon is the cos-type lettuce Outredgious (which I grew last year and found to be a sturdy, well-coloured lettuce). Red lettuces, as I've mentioned before, are less attractive to slugs and snails - and they're a pretty addition to both the vegetable bed and the salad bowl.
If it's organic vegetable seeds that you crave, let me also recommend the catalogue from the Organic Centre in Leitrim, and the Organic Gardening Catalogue from Deelish Garden Centre in Skibbereen. Varieties bred for organic growing are generally more resistant to diseases and pests, so they are less likely (than some other kinds) to meet with disaster on their journey from seed to table.
Nonetheless, much of the breeding work is done by the conventional seed companies, and many worthy varieties appear first in the mainstream catalogues before being adopted by the organic seed producers. This year, for example, Thompson & Morgan offer a couple of new club-root-resistant brassicas: an autumn-maturing cabbage called 'Kilaton', and 'Clapton', a cauliflower that is ready to eat from late summer to late autumn, depending on when you sow it. That company has 90 new vegetable seed varieties for 2008, including compact varieties suitable for growing in containers, such as pea Half Pint and iceberg lettuce Mini Green Improved. Its range of salad leaves has expanded also: of special interest to gardeners with tiny patches, or no patches at all, are the baby leaf mixtures, which can be grown in a large pot on a balcony or an outside windowsill.
Gardeners who like sweet tomatoes will be interested in Suncherry Premium, a cherry tomato that has knocked the sugary Sungold off its perch as the sweetest tom. When measured on the Brix sweetness scale (first I heard of it too), Sungold registers between 9 and 10, while Suncherry Premium consistently hits 10.
Mr Fothergill's, another big seed company, has 70 new vegetable varieties, among them several for container growing: courgette Midnight, dwarf bean Dual, tomato Tumbling Tom Red (already available from T & M). Mr Fothergill's also offers plenty of salad leaf mixtures. And while we are on that subject, let me remind you of a good way to use up all those old seed packets of leafy vegetables that you suspect may be too old for germination. Mix them together and sow thinly in a bed or in containers. Some will germinate, some will not. Those that do poke their heads above the soil can be used as mixed baby salad leaves when they are a few inches tall. All of the following produce edible infant leaves: oriental greens, leafy brassicas, onions, leeks, spinach, chard, beetroot, celery, most herbs, and - of course - all salad leaves. This kind of improvised hotchpotch is rich fodder for gardening kids, as it offers endless opportunities for tasting and examining and guessing what's what.
Gardening isn't all about food (although at this time of the year that's what interests me most), and the seed catalogues are full of new ornamental plants. For those who can't tear themselves away from the food idea just yet, both Mr Fothergill's and T & M offer a chocolate-scented yellow daisy, Berlandiera lyrata, while the latter company also has Centratherum intermedia, with pineapple-scented foliage. The purple flowers are said to attract butterflies. So also do echinacea, and T & M have two new kinds, 'Pink Parasol' and 'Double Decker'. The first produces larger-than-usual blooms, while the second has curious hats of extraneous petals perched on top of the central boss. The same company has a cosmos (another good nectar plant), 'Antiquity', which opens burgundy, and fades to bronze-salmon.
Grasses remain all the rage, and the catalogues are full of them. I'm fond of the soldierly Pennisetum 'Purple Majesty', which was introduced a few years ago at Chelsea. The wine-coloured millet has a stiff, upright habit and is an ideal candidate for large pots that you might use as sentries or focal-points in your garden.
jpowers@irish-times.ie