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Catalog Shopping for Northern Gardeners

© Mary Henry

A factor often overlooked by northern gardeners when ordering plants from a catalog is the shipping season. Landscape plants are more safely shipped while dormant. Some winters our ground is still frozen into early April. If we order from places where plants come out of dormancy much earlier, they will arrive long before we are able to put them in the ground. Nothing is so frustrating as trying to deal with dormant plants in your warm home. I won't even go there - you can imagine. It is best to order from a northern source whose growing season matches ours or look for a catalog whose inventory is kept in cold storage so the plants can still be shipped when your ground has thawed. Again, if it isn't clear, call and ask. Many catalog order forms have a spot to enter the desired shipping date.

Much of our garden catalog shopping is done for seeds for our vegetable and flower gardens. You would think that annuals will grow anywhere there is a summer, so the source is not important. Northern gardeners still have to think about more than just the physical or flavor characteristics of the flowers and veggies. Our growing season is shorter than that in most of the U.S. My transition from zone 6 to zone 4 meant that I lost more than 50 days of the growing season that I used to have. Plus, I have to wait 2 and a half weeks longer to put out my tomato transplants. My favorite tomato, Brandywine, is a 75 to 78 day variety. In zone 6 that meant I started getting ripe Brandywines around the 4th of July. When I grow that variety in zone 4 (I do it anyway), I don't see my first ripe tomato until the last week in August. With an average fall frost date around Sept. 20, I have to eat fast. We must look carefully at the "days to maturity" column in the seed catalogs to choose varieties that will produce early enough to be of benefit to us, but there is another dimension to this as well. If we have a cooler and cloudier than average summer, the tomatoes can be even later because they are heat lovers. Choose varieties adapted to this.

The cooler summers are why I came here in the first place, so I choose most varieties from catalogs that specialize in short-season plants. There are a number of them, mostly located in northern places. Here are three of my favorites, Johnny's, Stokes and Territorial Seed. To find catalogs that grow and sell northern adapted plants of all kinds and to find out what other gardeners have to say about them try out the Plants By Mail FAQ. This site has been collecting information on how to contact these companies and publishing their customers' comments since 1994. They don't provide catalogs, but they provide the information to order them and to be a informed shopper too.