What will we be munching this year?

I was going to write a "What will I be growing?" post, but really, now that I'm focusing on more of an edible landscape approach, this is really a "What will we be munching?" post.

When it comes to fruit and vegetable seeds and starts, I have an "eyes bigger than stomach" problem: I always want far more than I could possibly plant or feed my family. Half of my problem is the gorgeous, glossy seed catalogs. They are the devil. In The Dirty Life, one of my favorite farm and garden books, Kristin Kimball writes that "the whole trick of seed catalogs is that they come into the house in winter, when everything still seems possible and the work of growing things is too far in front of you to be seen clearly," and describes her first winter's worth of seed catalogs as "piling up next to the bed like farmer porn." How perfect of an analogy is that? Esssscuse me while I just jam a few more of these under my mattress where Mom won't find them...

Botanical Interests is, to me, the sexiest of the sexy when it comes to seed catalogs. Those illustrations!

Botanical Interests, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

I dog-eared just about every page in my BI seed catalog after I got it last month, and some of the pages? Double-dog-eared. It was ridiculous. So I had to figure out a way to pare it down, and I finally landed on an ingenious solution: employ the Magic of the Painfully Pragmatic Husband.

"Which of these do you think we'll actually eat?" I asked, and lo, after our brief conference, the list became much shorter and more manageable. Okra? Out. Cauliflower? Ick. Forget it. Greens? Snow peas? Fancy carrots? All systems go. Beets in a rainbow of colors? Got some side-eye on that one, but we'll let it slide. Melons? Tomatoes? Potatoes? This is America! Those are REQUIRED GARDEN PURCHASES!

So now I'm sitting pretty with about twenty packets of Normal People Food seeds, plus Tristar strawberry starts and Adirondack Blue potatoes. In my next post, I'll profile what's headed into the dirt first: Asian Salad Greens. Mmm!