Letters from Old Gardening Friends

By Ron Dieter, Sunnyfield Greenhouse & Gardens

January 13, 1999

If a gardener is going to be snowed in for three or four days, early January is a good time to have it happen. Over the past couple weeks our mailbox has been crammed with plant and seed catalogs. This first- and last, I hope- blizzard of the year gave me some time to go through the pile of catalogs, sorting out the duplicates and triplicates and selecting a few favorites for closer scrutiny.

When I first started to garden, vegetables were my big thing and the Burpee Seed Catalog was my favorite. I could depend on the Burpee family to give me straightforward facts about the seeds they offered without a lot of extra adjectives and fluff.

But alas, the modern world of mergers and acquisitions has overtaken the lowly seed and plant business. Several years ago the Burpee family sold their business to Ball Seed, an international company and one of the largest horticultural concerns in the world. At first, as with all such dealings, not much changed. But soon, the whole Burpee family was out on its ear and things began to "improve". Gone was the annual friendly letter from Mr. Burpee, thanking me for my past business. The catalog got bigger- more the size of a magazine. And instead of one annual catalog, I started getting several editions, and often several copies of each.

The inside cover of my latest Burpee catalog has a message from Mr. Ball who, by the way, never mentions any gratitude for my order last year. He’s too busy talking about his Sure Start Plants, like they are some kind of new invention. He’s trying to get me excited about buying a six-pack of tomato plants for $14.95. I’m no marketing genius, but I’d be willing to bet that Mr. Ball doesn’t ship very many of those plants to rural midwesterners. In this world of market niches and target marketing, I would think that someone has assembled a mailing list of people with more money than brains, a perfect match for this Sure Start Plant thing.

The feature presentation of this year’s catalog, however, is not the pre-started plants. It is Ruby Queen Sweet Corn, a picture of which graces the cover of the "special edition" of the 1999 catalog. I would think the picture is meant to make me drool with anticipation. Instead my first reaction was that it was some kind of monochromatic Indian Corn. I will say that the idea of eating it never crossed my mind until I saw the name of the corn at the bottom of the picture. Even then, the idea did not seem like a good one.

In the description of the corn, the catalog says that I won’t believe how appetizing a red corn can be. They’re right about that. As they go on about the virtues of this corn I get the impression they are trying to convince themselves to take a bite. An added bonus, they say, is that "the red tassles and stalks make fantastic autumn decorations". Apparently my intial reaction was right on the money.

Purple asparagus, orange watermelon, and especially red sweet corn just seem obscene. The seeds and plants should be sold in plain brown wrappers and planted behind the barn where the neighbors won’t see them. I like a little adventure in my life, but I like my sweet corn yellow, my green beans green, and my watermelons red. The Burpee Catalog still offers a fine selection of good vegetable and flower seeds, and I’ll be placing my order as usual. But I liked the way garden catalogs used to be- like letters from old gardening friends.