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Am I the only one who misses plain old seed catalogs from 20 years ago?

I was flipping through a glossy garden center magazine last night and realized it’s all hybrid this and designer that, nothing like the simple catalogs my dad used to order from in 1999. Those old ones had maybe 50 tomato varieties, all open-pollinated, with no fancy photoshopped pictures, just honest drawings. Does anyone else think the simpler catalogs made choosing seeds easier, or am I just stuck in the past?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_wells4613d agoMost Upvoted

I still have a 2001 Burpee catalog in my basement. It's all faded and dog-eared but it's a time capsule. Back then you could flip through and actually read the descriptions. I grew the same 'Brandywine' tomatoes for ten years straight from that catalog. Nobody was trying to sell you a "patented bio-engineered super slicer" with a fancy name like 'Summertime Gold XL'. I switched to using Baker Creek a few years ago because they still print that old school feel with drawings and real stories behind each seed. Your 1999 catalog sounds like a gem, I'd hold onto it if you still have it.

river35113d ago

Oh, actually, that 2001 Burpee catalog was already pretty glossy and full of hybrid stuff by then. The really plain ones with just line drawings and no photos were more like 1970s and 80s era. But I get what you're saying about the older ones being easier to read through without all the marketing noise. My grandpa had a 1983 catalog from a place called Shumway's and it was just black and white drawings with two sentence descriptions for each tomato variety. You knew exactly what you were getting without any hype about "disease resistance" or "record yields." Those simpler catalogs definitely made choosing seeds feel more like picking out a good friend than buying a product.