Group of seed catalogs from a variety of companies advertising their products for 2021. Shutterstock

In years past, I waited until the new year to place orders with Maine-based seed companies. That changed when so many companies started offering discounts for early orders.

For example, we placed our Pinetree Garden Seeds order the Sunday before Thanksgiving because they were having a 20 percent off sale, and we will have placed other orders by the time this column is published.

The catalogs are a pleasure to read in the cold winter months, even if you don’t plan to order anything.

FEDCO, based in Clinton, sends out two catalogs, one for seeds and supplies and the other for trees, shrubs and perennials. I had to look this up, and I wonder why it took me so long to do this: FEDCO stands for Federation of Cooperatives, from back when the business also operated a food co-op in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Both catalogs are black and white on non-glossy paper, and packed with information. Last year FEDCO stopped selling seeds from Syngenta because of the corporation’s manufacturing of toxic agricultural chemicals. Customer reaction, buyers are told, has been positive.

As a dedicated potato grower – both because I like them and because they are fairly easy to grow – I was pleased to see five new seed-potato collections: For making potato chips, Maine classics, with blue flesh, new varieties and for growing in containers. They would be fun for a potato lover with limited gardening space.

The seed catalog also includes planting guides for vegetables, herbs and flowers, and is entirely user-friendly.

The Trees, Shrubs and Perennials catalog has had to make some adjustments to its tree-storage facility because of climate change: “After 40 years of relying on increasingly unreliable cold winters to cool our shop, we had to say uncle.” That catalog is where we ordered trees to replace pines we cut down at camp after a big pine fell during a wind storm and destroyed the porch. (We were worried other trees would fall next, so took them down instead.)

Although we ordered from Pinetree in November, we probably will order again before spring when we discover what we missed in our first order. Pinetree, in New Gloucester, is dedicated to home gardeners. It offers smaller packets of seeds for people who’d like to try just a little bit of something and don’t want to be bothered with saving leftover seeds.

The introduction notes that they have 142 new products and have lowered shipping costs.

Pinetree Lettuce Mix is my go-to lettuce, and I plant it in a cold frame about every three weeks, removing the clear top in early May. Without that protection, woodchucks would eat the produce before we did. I was tempted by a new Wild Garden Mix, which has more and more diverse varieties including some head-lettuce, and I might try that later.

New varieties, organic varieties and those that work best for containers are all distinguished by small, easy-to-understand symbols.

Wood Prairie Farm, owned by the Gerritsen family in the Aroostook County town of Bridgewater, specializes in potatoes – both to eat and as seed for home and commercial gardeners.

A new variety this year is Sarpo Una, brought in from the Sarpo family in Hungary. It has rosy skin and waxy white flesh and is supposed to be tasty and high yielding. Another new variety is ND Aroostook Red, which was bred and developed at the Aroostook Farm Potato Experiment Station in Maine as well as in North Dakota. It has white flesh and red skin that maintains its color in storage.

Two potato collections are offered for home gardeners who seek variety but lack room. The Red White and Blue collection has Dark Red Norland, King Henry and Adirondack Blue to create a 10-foot row. The high-yielding Mountaineer collection has tall-growing varieties Baltic Rose, Sarpo Miro and Huckleberry Gold for 12 hills of potatoes.

Although Wood Prairie specializes in potatoes, it also sells organic seeds for other vegetables and flowers.

Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Winslow is Maine’s best-known seed company. More than 50 years old, it has been employee-owned for the past 10 years. Ten of its seed selections have won All-America Selections awards over the years. The company is innovative, with a worldwide reputation for quality.

Its more than 150 new offerings this year include a lime-green snacking cucumber called Gimlet, which looks attractive and interesting; and Troubadour XR, a variety of corn that is disease-resistant, has large ears, and is said to be sweet and flavorful.

To write this column, I skimmed the catalogs for highlights. Serious reading will begin in January.

Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com.