Our kind of summer reading

By virtue of your address, you get to send in your wish list twice a year: early spring and now. That's how it's best done, here in the land of two harvests. The garden cliche in the East and Midwest -- curling up in an armchair beside a fire, sipping cocoa and poring over seed catalogs on a blustery February day -- can still be part of your yearly regimen, but in a summery, Southern California way.

While the majority of the nation's gardeners spend the weekend toiling in a stifling, dank, mosquito onslaught, you, oh wise one, can loll under a poolside umbrella, sipping a mojito, scanning seed catalogs and dreaming of autumn days.

You've already planted your zukes, cukes, beans, basil and bells. You've mulched and weeded. You've fed nutrients and fended off pests. Finally, during our true dormant season, you get to rest awhile and let the plants do their thang.

While those other gardeners bust their humps bringing in a single harvest before the first frost, you get to fantasize about the cool, crisp snap peas your second harvest of the year will produce. You can imagine your fall-winter garden providing chervil, radicchio and butter leaf salads -- picked, rinsed, tossed, dressed and enjoyed right there on the patio under mild November skies.

Finding a favorite catalog is also part of the sunny adventure. Most are free or cost a mere scratch of coins, and you can request them year-round. You'll discover a catalog for every botanical whim. There are seed companies that sell primarily newfangled hybrids. Others sell oldfangled heirlooms. Some sell only irises; a few sell just potatoes and garlic. The choices are myriad.

I like to hunt through the catalogs of companies in the West first. Though the results may be only minimally different, I prefer using seeds that have been farm-raised in soils comparable to ours and under reasonably similar weather conditions. Seeds sold by Western catalogs often are grown on mom 'n' pop farms. (That Italian Romanesco broccoli, therefore, has been reared in New Mexico, not New Jersey.) Only after I've finished "out West" do I scope out seeds from other realms.