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The seed catalogs certainly make it look easy. They turn up every year, ripe with pictures and dreams, when the ground is mean and dead. Each has a distinctive niche: a model for the gardener you imagine you want to be.

fedcoseeds.com Fedco catalog.

I like Fedco, where where I ordered my seeds, in part because it doesn’t give you retouched photos of bodacious summer squash and tarted-up chard. Instead, the catalog is filled with populist jibes and unvarnished growing advice: e.g., “You should guillotine [this lettuce] with your garden shears or cutting knife. Now if only we could perform similar surgery (speaking figuratively, of course) on those short-sighted greedy politicians, traders and bankers who got us to this sorry state by deregulating everything in sight!”

The catalog actually comes on black-and-white newsprint. This visual style sets a low bar for success: If your garden grows in color, you’re ahead of the game. Read more…

Sara Jorde for The New York Times For Michael Tortorello, the first step in starting a garden is learning about seeds.

If this new blog were a Jeopardy category, the title could be, “Things That Everybody Else Already Knows About Gardening.”

That back acre of ignorance is a bit of a problem for me because I’m starting a brand new vegetable garden this spring in the empty lot next to my Minneapolis duplex, which I will also be writing about in an occasional series of articles in the Home section.

You may be doing the same — although probably not in my yard. And we’re apparently in good company. Seed companies are ringing up the kind of growth that used to belong to mortgage brokers. Seeds of Change, a New Mexico company which calls itself the nation’s largest seller of organic seed, reported a year-over-year sales surge of 30 percent in the first months of 2009.

“We expect that increase to continue,” said Marc Cool, the company’s director. “And we’re seeing a shift to more vegetable seed.” Shipments are increasing to urban areas and order sizes have shot up, too.

It’s impossible to read a seed catalog these days without coming across folksy odes to “heirloom varieties.” As a marketing term, those words sound about as wholesome as monogamy and checkers. But then most of us understand — at least in the abstract — what monogamy means.

So I called someone who knows from seeds: Josh Kirschenbaum, product development director for the Territorial Seed Company. In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, on the outskirts of Eugene, Mr. Kirschenbaum tests seeds on a 44-acre certified organic plot. A recent Friday afternoon found him padding around the company’s 120-foot-long greenhouse, where a trapped hummingbird was threatening to fly into an exhaust fan. Mr. Kirschenbaum made heroic efforts to concentrate — and duck — while this Buster Keaton scene played out overhead. Read more…