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Friday, December 28, 2012

This week in the garden - #44

This was the week of the seed catalog. Every day that our post-woman delivered mail this week, she stuffed our mailbox with seed catalogs. Or, as I like to think of it, garden porn.

This week's haul of porn.

All those beautiful skins on those perfect vegetables. The flowers so gorgeous you can almost smell them through the pages. The shrubs and trees in their tantalizing poses, especially those fruit trees with yummy, blemish-free fruits that you long to just reach out and pluck. And the bulbs! Bulbs that burst from the covering garment of the Earth with their impossibly bright colors on perfect forms. It's all garden porn, I tell you, meant to entice us to sin by ordering more seeds and plants and bulbs than we can possibly care for or that we even have room for in our gardens!

And do I resist the temptation that these catalogs bring? Of course not! After all, where's the fun in resisting temptation.

I do have a complaint though. Several, actually.

The skins on my vegetables never look as perfect as those in the catalogs. My flowers may smell good but they always seem to look a little bedraggled. My shrubs and trees seem to grow very asymmetrically and their fruits are almost never without blemish. And bulbs? Fuhgeddabout it! I have no luck with bulbs.

So my complaint is that my plants never live up to the perfection promised by the seed catalogs. If only I could airbrush my garden to make it look more like all those gorgeous plants on the pages.

Well, as I sit by my fireplace on a cold winter day and browse my stash of garden porn, I can fantasize. Isn't that what porn is all about anyway?

8 comments:

  1. I've also been enjoying the garden porn. Email today from one company talking about the new corn that can be grown in containers. Oh, My!

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    1. I saw that, too, Snap! We must be on the same mailing lists.

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  2. I don't get seed catalogues, but I buy all my plants and things for the garden online, so my inbox is stuffed with offers these days. I wasn't going to buy anything, I had promised myself not to, but then I found an offer for a Callistemon on sale. It was on my list to buy this spring anyway so....it will arrive next week :-)

    As for airbrushing my garden, I must admit I actually do that already. I sometime use a Photoshop filter meant for making models getting nicer skin on the petals of the close-ups of my flowers, taking out blemishes, dents and aphids not meant to be there. Hey, that's what they do in those porn - I mean seed catalogues of yours too! In real life those fruit and flowers used in the catalogues look exactly like yours and mine :-)

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  3. Haha! My mailbox was stuffed with catalogs too. I have the same complaints as you. It's fun to dream a little though, isn't it?

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  4. Thank you! We have been away from home and I have been feeling sad about having to return. But you have cheered me up by reminding me of all the porn, I mean garden catalogs I will have waiting for me!

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