Farmers’ Market:
Botanical diversity
Shippers of seed catalogs know exactly what they are doing from a marketing standpoint. The brightly inked, slick paged missives arrive surfeit with professionally framed photographs and seductive descriptions of fabulously diverse botanical bounty. They appear in mailboxes in late January and early February when the home gardener has been in a visual deprivation tank resulting from months and months of white snow and ice outside the window. Each page captures the imagination of what the plant might look like, smell like, and taste like once the summer sun warms the land again.
Gardeners and planters thumb through the catalogs again and again, back to front, then front to back, pages worn to flannel-like softness by repeated handling. Dog-earred corners mark more and more discoveries as the catalogs collect in haphazard piles next to a favorite chair near the wood stove. Varieties new to the area or species never before seen tempt a purchaser to make a wish-list that grows longer and longer with each perusal of the catalog until a grower creates an impossible order, far too many seeds for the available prepared ground hidden beneath a thick white blanket and often too much for the bank account besides. How to choose which to order and which to let go by the wayside, at least for the next growing season?
The folks at Whole Earth Farm on the Easton Road in Presque Isle offer a marvelous solution to the excessive temptations offered by seed catalogs over the winter months, one that does not require plowing up the entire lawn for added seed beds come spring. Next week, we will take a peek at what they have to offer at their stand at the Presque Isle Farmers Market in the Aroostook Centre Mall Parking lot every Saturday morning or nearly every day (call ahead at 769-2107) right on the farm.
Editor’s note: This weekly column is written by members of the Presque Isle Farmers’ Market. For more information or to join, contact their secretary/treasurer Steve Miller of Westmanland at 896-5860 or via e-mail at beetree@xpressamerica.net.
