I adore garden catalogs. Back before I had a garden, I pored over garden catalogs as if they were aspirational reading (correction: from the time I was a child, I was always growing something. What I meant was when I was still growing perennials, trees & vegetables in containers  on a balcony and  not in the ground–although that too can be a perfectly good garden if you’re happy with it. I  wasn’t.)

I learned most of my botanical Latin from poring over these same garden catalogs. It just sort of stuck with me.

But these days it seems, like so much else, the catalogs not only arrive earlier and earlier and they practically promise harvests before things are planted.

And then there are microgreens. Plant today,  harvest this weekend ( well, not quite, but almost.  In most cases, you can begin harvesting by Monday.)

And of course with hoop houses, poly tunnels and the like (never mind our changing climate patterns) we plant earlier and harvest later than ever before.

There is still a reason that I live in a place with seasons, particularly as I age. It’s to give me a rest. I don’t want to garden year round  (other than in the house, with my collection of hundreds of house plants).

So while I adore seeing all the seed and plant catalogs come in, please do not expect me to placing tomato seed orders before New Years. Let me finish out one year before I begin thinking of the next.

Actually, I’m not ranting so much on fall decorating–I’ll get to that in a moment. What I really don’t get–and it’s that I’m ranting on for the moment here–is Halloween decorating.

Halloween decorating–indoors and out–is now the second most profitable, if you want to put it that way, holiday for retailers. What on earth? Or maybe I mean under the earth? What are we celebrating?

I’m all for having fun and I’m all for letting kids safely celebrate the holiday–but what I do not get is these homes that go all out and turn themselves into miniature haunted houses. Some almost provoke car crashes they are so elaborate (and yes, I know the same thing happens at Christmas with the Christmas light extravaganzas–that too is way too over the top for me!)

One Halloween house nearby even gets political with its theme–the owner is a history professor or something. Oh puh-leez! While I certainly admire the creativity and hours of work that go into this fiasco, I find the whole thing bizarre and macabre.

But then again, I’ve never been into horror movies or films.

The thing I’m a little less conflicted about–but I still wonder about–is the autumn decorating thing. What’s with all these suburban homes decorating themselves up with corn stalks and hay bales and pumpkins and scarecrows until you’d think you were back on the farm–until you drive 10 feet and you realize, “oh no, it’s just another suburban tract home that’s run amok with farm decorating again?”

Mind you, the fall look can be beautifully done–but what’s up with that? We don’t live anywhere near farms. And while I’m not adverse to a pumpkin now and again gracing my property (although if it doesn’t rain, there’s no way I’ll indulge because the squirrels will be after that thing before it’s on my stoop for 3 days!) there’s no way you’ll find me indulging in corn stalks, hay bales and scarecrows–not sustainable, for one thing, and not really appropriate for my “sense of place.”

It’s my Mom and sister who live in Oklahoma, not me.

I can’t imagine why, when I and my neighbors live in New England, home of some of the most beautiful foliage shows in the world, my neighbors would choose to import all the trappings of farm life to their very colonial New England properties.

But, I guess I just have to fall back on my favorite saying here: If we all liked the same thing what a boring world we’d have!

Happy Autumn–however you celebrate–and decorate!