There is no better garden manual available than the West Coast Seeds catalogue and gardening guide. It lists a fine selection of interesting varieties and does much more.
Three colour charts give at-a-glance timings for indoor sowing, direct outdoor seeding, and transplanting each vegetable, herb and flower. Detailed planting and care directions accompany each vegetable, flower and major herb type.
Informative articles, all indexed at the end of the catalogue, cover about 70 topics that include Success with Seeds, Companion Planting, Fertilizers, Crop Rotation and听more. Every major insect pest and plant disease is dealt with. All the catalogue鈥檚 garden supplies, such听as plant labels, row covers, seeding and watering supplies, are indexed as well for speedy access to desired items.
A new format for variety listings adds much to the pleasure of browsing though the 2016 WCS catalogue. Instead of the names and descriptions being accompanied by photos scattered around the page, as is usually done in catalogues, here each listed variety with description has the colour photo directly above it 鈥� the ultimate in reader-friendly presentation.
The 2016 catalogue has many听interesting new additions as well as old favourites. Here鈥檚 a听sampler.
鈥� Kale. A colour directory to听kale over two pages includes a听winter mixture and the new Scarlet, a highly curled, dark red kale good for both baby leaf and mature kale. Kale Storm is a pelleted mix with seeds for up to four different varieties in each pellet for a fast salad blend of frilled, blue and purple types. Kale Storm would be ideal as an ornamental-edible autumn container planting.
鈥� Leafy greens. As well as an extensive listing of butterhead, crisp-head, leaf and romaine lettuces there is a page each of baby-leaf lettuces, mesclun mixes, and pelleted blends. New are six Easy-Leaf varieties featuring 鈥渟uper-fast growth鈥� and easy harvesting. I have my eye on Hampton, a 鈥渧oluminous oak-leaf lettuce鈥� good for year-round salad production.
鈥� Napoli is one of the best carrots I鈥檝e ever grown.
鈥� Kelsae seeds from this source always produce my best onions.
鈥� Parsley Pea, grown for its edible tendrils, leaflets and flowers, is harvested at 15 to 20 cm high and then left to produce a second cutting of greens.
鈥� Mini Purple and Mini Red are colourful daikon radishes new to the catalogue.
鈥� Tomatoes. A series of three 鈥淏umble Bee鈥� vining (staking) cherry tomatoes have beautiful streaking on Pink, Purple and Sunrise (orange) skins.
鈥� Sweet peas over two pages include the wonderful heirlooms Painted Lady (pink and white) and Matucana (violet and maroon) as well as the bicoloured, highly fragrant Spencer Ripple mixture.
鈥� Goldrush, a midseason potato with white flesh and brown russet skin, is one of four new seed potato varieties. WCS is a source too for reusable potato growing bags and burlap bags for storage.
Order a print catalogue at 1-888-804-8820 or through westcoastseeds.com. Garden centres that have racks of the seeds will also have print catalogues for customers.
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Calling all clubs. Notices of club听meetings and garden events for 2016 have been coming in. Thanks to all the garden-related organizations that help me in this way to keep the gardening public informed of your activities.
I invite all gardening groups to send along details of activities and programs for inclusion in the Events portion of upcoming columns.
If your group has finalized plans for a flower show, plant sale or other event, send details to [email protected]. Note there is no 鈥渢鈥� in the middle of Chesnut.
To be sure of reserving space in a column for your event, send the information at least three weeks before its date, or even earlier if possible. To allow for computer issues and other assorted life glitches I work a week to 10 days ahead of publication dates, sometimes more if I听need some time off.
Include a description of the meeting or other event with the location, time, cost of admission and points of interest. Please do provide both the day of the week and the date. It鈥檚 easy enough to type in a wrong number, and a check between day and date allows me to pick up conflicts that sometimes occur between them. A phone number as well as the email address for further information is helpful.
Please place all the information in the body of the email rather than in attachments.
