Sage Gardener

We were, in fact, eating some freshly-picked, beautiful, blue-green Lacinato kale, aka dinosaur kale. My dining partners were impressed, but what they didn’t know, and soon learned, was how runty our plants were. “You should have ordered the Walking Stick kale,” says my wife, Anne, grabbing our dog-eared copy of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalogue. There, pictured in the kale section, was a gray-whiskered gardener atop a teetering ladder, plucking kale from a 20-foot-high stalk.

It’s that time of year when brown grass gets browner every day while multicolor splashes of brilliant Pippin’s Golden Honey peppers, Kyoto Red carrots and kaleidoscopic Glass Gem popping corn jump right off the catalogue pages into our imagination. “I planted Glass Gem popcorn and the ears were the size of your thumb,” one dinner guest says. And we’re off, all of us digging up dirt on seeds that have let us down by only sprouting disappointment: the oh-so-challenging ramp and garlic seeds; the Dutchman’s pipe seeds, terribly expensive and requiring three months of refrigeration and six months’ germination — before dying; the Amazing Grey Poppies that did anything but amaze; caper seeds; miner’s lettuce and even pine nut seeds. “How much of it is our trying to grow something that’s never meant to thrive in our soil and climate?” another dinner guest wonders. “Probably, but I feel so betrayed when I compare my plants to the ones in the catalogue. Worse yet, I feel like such a bad gardener,” Anne admits. “Does that mean you decided not to buy the package of 1,500-Year-Old Cave Beans?” I wonder. “They’re already in the mail,” Anne says.

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