W Atlee Burpee Co

It's strawberry season. Time to plant and eat those bright red berries that make you think of summer. While you're planting, why not try growing alpine strawberries? Considered a gourmet delicacy, these small, tasty berries are easy to grow and bear fruit most of the year. "Alpines [Fragaria alpina] are a great snacking berry," says Sharon Kaszan, trials manager for W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa.

Native plants and wildflowers start their growth with the first rains, so now is the natural time to plant them. Natives may need extra water during their first year, but after that they should be able to get by pretty much on their own. Wildflower seeds do best if the soil is prepared first and the seeds are covered lightly before they're watered. To cast seeds about willy-nilly is literally to feed birds and rodents.

Though it grows like a weed and takes very little care, arugula adds a gourmet touch to salads, sandwiches, pasta and pizza. This spicy green with its nutty tang is one of the star ingredients in mesclun lettuce mixes. Also known as roquette and rocket, arugula is native to Southern Europe. It can be grown all year here, but does best in the cooler weather of winter and spring.

The seed catalogues arrived a while back, around the first of the year when I was far too busy to browse through them. This timing is for the benefit of those living in colder climates where all that can be done in January is dream. Californians have less need to dream of gardening but no less need of seed catalogues, for in them can be found the variety that is the spice of gardening. My current favorite is the Thompson & Morgan catalogue (P.O. Box 1308, Jackson, N.J. 08527).

Schoolteacher Larry Kirkus knows that pretty flowers and tasty vegetables are not the only benefits gained from having a garden. Kirkus helped his sixth-graders produce a vegetable garden from a barren plot of land at Stoner Avenue Elementary School in West Los Angeles and watched them apply their classroom lessons to the real world.

Genetically modified plants have yet to make it to the home gardener, but you wouldn't know it from the disclaimers in various seed catalogs. "None of the seeds we sell are genetically engineered," declares Heirloom Seeds of West Elizabeth, Pa. "We do not support the development [of] genetically engineered seeds and will not sell them," says the electronic version of the Cook's Garden of Londonderry, Vt. Robert L. Johnston Jr.

ITT Corp., struggling to cut debt and ward off the threat of takeover, said Wednesday that it is "accelerating" its 5-year-old divestiture program and plans to sell about $1.7 billion in assets. In a statement attributed to Chairman Rand V. Araskog, the New York conglomerate said it will sell some overseas insurance, publishing and educational-service units, as well as minority stakes in overseas telecommunications subsidiaries and its Sheraton hotel unit.

In the spring, a gardener's fancy turns to thoughts of what to plant. For the flower garden, one can take advantage of the many perennials that are debuting at nurseries this year, and for the vegetable garden, one can discover the European varieties that are available for the first time in seed catalogues. EUROPEAN VEGETABLES ARE the hot news at the edible end of the garden.