Best source for gardening tech

Peaceful Valley

Organic gardeners, both backyard and commercial, know this mail-order outfit as the premier source for organic farming supplies. They’ve got everything: Natural pest controls, insect traps, cover crop seeds in bulk, sticky tape in all varieties. I mean where else can you buy a gallon of milky spore disease (for Japanese beetles), or white fly parasites in quantities of a thousand, or red worm *eggs*, with a side order of bat guano? Not only do they carry mulching film in standard black, but they also have it in innovative silver, green or red colors as well — each spectrum producing different effects for different plants.

But this catalog is also useful in other ways. Non-gardeners and green householders will find hard-to-find products such as poison-free cockroach traps which use cockroach pheromones.

Best of all, Peaceful Valley collects the best gear for growers of any type. Here is your source for plastic deer fencing, the world’s best walk-behind Italian tillers, superlative hand tools, the best selection of drip irrigation supplies, and — my favorite — reusable foam seedling trays. You’ll find this source absolutely essential if you grow anything.

This catalog is a throwback to the mail order catalogs of old. 1) They tend to only sell the best stuff, not just the best-selling or most profitable , and 2) they still print it on paper. You can spend several evenings reading it with great profit. You get a short course in state of the art practices for small time farmer and serious gardening.

They have a pretty good website, too (but not as informative as the paper catalog). And they are easy to work with. — KK

Optimistic dreambooks

Garden and Seed Catalogs

Gardening catalogs are the very epitome of dreambooks. Some are quite beautiful, all ripe with the promise of fulfillment in a slightly other universe, but here are the three that make late winter in the heartland a little less bitter:

Seedsavers Exchange puts out a gorgeous catalog and promotes Earth-respecting attitudes with no preaching or guilt-laying. Their online version is, to my mind, among the best designs of its kind. Their descriptions usually include a few words about the histories and sources of their heirloom varieties — makes it hard not to feel involved with the ancient epic of how “weeds” got turned into the exquisite diversity of crop plants we take for granted these days.

Johnny’s Selected Seeds is a commercial version of a labor of love. It’s a real working catalog with limited color photos but a large and well-selected inventory of standard, heirloom, and organic veggie, herb, flower, grain, and covercrop seeds. What makes the catalog special is its generosity with information. If you need a tomato that resists some particular kind of rot, you’ll probably find it here. You’ll probably find it in other catalogs, too, but won’t necessarily know it. There’s extensive cultural, climate, and harvesting info that makes me resent almost all other catalogs for their lack of same. Johnny’s really wants their seeds to grow strong and prosper.

Gardens Alive is a southern Indiana seller of products for organic/”environmentally responsible” gardening and growing. Natural fertilizers, biocontrols (they grow critters like parasitic wasps and nematodes themselves), natural lawn magic, redworms, composting accessories — a fairly thick little catalog with basic graphics and all kinds of dreams for the garden geek. Dozen-page guides to plant diseases, nutritional lacks, bugs. I get the same kind of thrill pawing through this jammed volume that I used to get with Edmunds or American Science and Surplus or the fireworks spreads, or, well, Whole Earth Catalog — It just makes my hands itch to get out there and tinker. — David Walker

Specialty root source

Potato Garden

Ever since I encountered fingerling potatoes in European restaurants I wanted to grow some of my own. I find these small fat-finger-shaped tubers have a nuttier, richer taste than regular potatoes. Potato Garden in Colorado is a mail order source that sells a dozen varieties of fingerlings and it’s been fun trying various breeds. Potato Garden also introduced me to scores of strains in “main” potatoes. And they offer an exotic variety of live starters for other root crops, such as garlic, onions, and sun chokes. Their catalog provides enough basic info about growing and storing roots that it serves as a one-stop short course. For spring delivery you need to order early. — KK

• Sun Chokes: Native of North America, a type of sunflower whose tuberous roots have been eaten for millennia by Native Americans. The first recorded discovery of sunchokes in America apparently occurred in Native American gardens along the eastern coastline in the early 1600's. The Indians called them "sun roots". Sunchokes are delicious eaten raw as they have a crisp, juicy texture like water chestnuts. We like to slice or grate them for a zesty addition to any fruit or vegetable salad. We have found that steaming or boiling is the best way to cook them, with a little butter and Real Salt.

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