ERIN NEGLEY | Staff Writer
If tending to gardens carried us through the pandemic, seed catalog are sparks of hope, carrying us through the long winter.
Even if you order online, these catalogs can inspire, inform and, yes, entertain. Just look at the artwork in Fedco’s catalog, which includes a beret-wearing cantaloupe, a pizza-eating crab, clowns, fairies and an octopus vaccinating a cabbage.
Here are seven seed catalogs to check out in your hands or online.
Rohrer Seeds
This Lancaster County business has mailed seed catalogs for more than 100 years.
The 2022 line-up has vintage cover crops like oats and clover. There’s also a new container collection with plants that don’t need a lot of space, including the award-winning pot-a-peno hot pepper, a baby cauliflower, golf ball-sized carrots and ruby crush, a high yielding grape tomato.
Sprout more than sunflower and kale microgreens with options like broccoli, red beet and cilantro.
Pick up a catalog at the retail store, 2472 Old Philadelphia Pike. Online download a digital version of the 2022 catalog or order a copy in the mail. Rohrer Seeds has two spring kickoff events at the store coming up at 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 26 and March 5 with a seed-packing demonstration and a seed-starting demonstration plus giveaways.
Heirloom Seed Project
Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum’s 2022 seeds continues the tradition of preserving heirloom plants that have historical significance in the Pennsylvania Dutch region. Preservation comes from expanding and planting seeds from this collection of mostly vegetables. New this year are Anna Fry red beans. They join favorites like the hinkelhatz pepper, Jenny Lind melon and Reiff ground cherry.
Find a catalog at lanc.news/LVSeed22 or call 717-733-2711. New this year is online ordering.
Another option is to find the seed brochure and seeds at the museum. The site’s Herb and Garden Faire is back May 6 and 7 after a pandemic break. Plants grown from the seed bank will be sold at the event, at 2451 Kissel Hill Road.
Burpee
Burpee grew from a farm in Doylestown, Bucks County, over more than a century ago.
The 2022 seed catalog has heirloom iceberg lettuce that was introduced in 1894 and the world’s first yellow sweet corn (Golden Bantam), introduced by Burpee in 1902.
This year, new crops include Everleaf Thai Towers (a Thai basil that grows 2-3 feet tall), SuperSauce paste tomato (just one 2-pound tomato will fill a sauce jar) and sweet sandia echinacea (with green and pink petals).
Order a catalog or see the digital version at burpee.com.
Johnny’s Selected Seeds
At 244 pages, this catalog from Maine is the biggest to show up in my mailbox. The 2022 catalog is packed with variety. You can pick from 41 different basils and seven kinds of nasturtium, for example. LNP | LancasterOnline readers say they like the wide variety with detailed cultivating instructions.
New in 2022 are the starstruck lettuce mix (a mix of baby leaves that crunch) and a daydream sunflower mix for more flowers over a longer period.
Order a catalog or see the digital version at johnnyseeds.com.
Online, the Johnny’s website has a grower’s library that’s packed with tools like calculators to know how much seed to buy, calendars to know when to plant and videos from past talks. (In “Tomatoes: 10 Unsung Heroes,” one of the speakers, Daniel Yoder, has roots in Lancaster County.)
Territorial Seed Company
Territorial, based in Oregon, has been another reader favorite for LNP | LancasterOnline readers for the variety of edible and ornamental seeds.
New this year are love-in-a-puff (a vine with white flowers and balloon seed pods) and candy cane chocolate cherry pepper (a striped snacking pepper). While many growers share container plants for small spaces, Territorial has a new kitchen counter collection. These peppers and tomatoes were picked to grow small and in lower light, like a windowsill.
Order a catalog or see the digital version at territorialseed.com.
Seed Savers Exchange
The heirlooms offered by this Iowa company come from a crowd-sourced collection of more than 20,000 seeds.
New introductions include Lorenzo Trussoni safflower (a colorful flower with petals that can substitute for saffron), Miss Annie Pearl Counselman collards and Bill Jump’s soup pea.
Bonus: here you’ll find seed-saving supplies you never knew you needed, including bags and envelopes for saving seed and tassel bags to hand pollinate corn and sorghum.
This winter, Seed Savers launched a webinar series about seed rematriation in Indigenous communities. Spaces for the free sessions went quickly but the series is available on YouTube.
Order a catalog or see the digital version at seedsavers.org.
Fedco Seeds and Supplies
This Maine company has a black-and-white catalog featuring a ton of variety, many exclamation points and giggle-worthy artwork. For example, the quarantina broccoli raab is illustrated with two masked growers cradling their precious quarantine vegetable.
New this year are kaleidoscope mix sweet pea, blonde beauty summer squash (“trials reveal this squash has more fun!”) and Yukihikari rice.
Order a catalog or download one at fedcoseeds.com.
