Actually the weather today is a vivid reminder that I live in zone 4. You know it's cold when we look through the binoculars to see if the flag is down on the mailbox before we suit up and trudge down there . No extra trips are being made outside today. It's blindingly white and bitterly cold out there .
We intend to settle down and order seeds,and we did make some progress today, dropping some of the catalogs we know we won't be ordering from into the recycling. With all the catalogs we get, there are way too many choices.
This year one catalog in particular captured my imagination for some reason. High Country Gardens : plants for the water wise garden and beyond is the name of this piece of temptation. This catalog comes from Santa Fe, NM. Something in me balks at ordering plants and having the poor things travel that kind of distance in a cardboard box. Still there is an agave on the front cover that is just sooo BIG!
Something needed to be done so I got a big old black marker and black marked all the plants that were zone 5 and up. Most of the really tempting plants were eliminated. Checking the rainfall map I discovered only non-Xeric plants are recommended for here. Now the temptation is nearly gone. At least it's down to a level where I can move this catalog into the recycling. Oh there is one other thing. The is the only catalog where I have ever seen Ribes odoratum, clove currant, for sale. Of course I have that so I don't need any more, but they do have it.