"Calendar winter" (as opposed to actual winter) only started a week ago, but I feel as if the new gardening season has already begun.  Why?  Because the catalog and internet vendors of plants and seeds have started mailing out catalogs and posting spring offerings on their websites.  In these days, as the old year wanes and the holiday excitement calms down, it is nice to start considering what to do with the garden next spring and summer.

Every since Sears and Montgomery Ward sent out their first mail order catalogs in the nineteenth century, catalogs have been "wish books".  Now websites fit into that category as well.  When I was a gardening novice, I developed a strategy to maxmize the pleasure that I get out of these wish vehicles.  I still use it and now that there are even more catalogs and websites, I get even more pleasure.

The strategy is this: whenever you receive a new mail order catalog or access a website whose owner has just put up the offerings for spring, go through, read all the descriptions, look at all the pictures and circle (or "cut and paste" onto a list that you save in a computer file) absolutely everything that interests you.  This does  not mean that you have committed yourself to buying the particular plant or plants; it just means that for some reason the specimen (or specimens) has piqued your curiosity.  If you are like me, over the next month or so you will put together an enormous, ruinously expensive master list.  Eventually, in late January or February, you can look at your wish list and your plant budget and start to tame your acquisitive urges.  You can comparison shop for the best prices.  You can decide which plants that you absolutely must  have and which you can live without.  The more prudent among us will even consider whether we actually have the space for all the plants on the list.  By the time you finally commit to buying plants, you will have gotten some of your more outrageous ideas resolved, one way or another.  It's a great way to get through the winter and a great way to kick off the gardening season.