Each year I keep a running list of how I’ll make my garden better the following year. This is an invaluable tool – no matter how good your memory, winter has a way of erasing from our minds all those good garden-related plans.
I’ll share with you some of the notes I’ve made for next year, both as an example of the kinds of things that should go on such a list and also to possibly spark some ideas for improving your own garden.
Keeping the list is not a time-consuming task. I fill about one page a year in a small notebook. I’ve expanded the explanations here because even though I may what just a few words in my notebook mean, you won’t.
1. Did not like the Purple Top White Globe turnips I planted this year. Next year plant Hakurei F1 hybrid turnips.
2. From my favorite seed catalog, order the turnip seeds as well as seeds of moss rose, nasturtiums and claytonia. Also horseradish roots and four grape plants.
3. Start 25 Kossak hybrid kohlrabi plants indoors before the growing season. Didn’t have enough this year.
4. Plant 100 pea plants and mulch them as soon as they germinate to prevent the plants from becoming stunted by soil that warms and dries out too quickly.
5. Buy 25 pink geraniums – 19 for the front yard to be planted in the ground, 3 for a pot to be set in the front flower bed and 3 for a pot near the pond.
6. Buy 18 pink petunias – 6 each in two front flowerbed pots, 6 in a pot by the pond.
Then there’s the list of things for my husband to help with:
7. Over the winter, cut down the lilac, willow and spruce behind the washline. All are half-dead or just ugly. Transplant a white pine that is growing too close to our burn pile into the vacated spot.
8. Cut down the Russian olive tree. It’s more than half dead and considered invasive besides.
9. Build two wooden supports for cucumbers to climb. They’ll take up less ground space and stay cleaner, and maybe won’t try to climb my tomato plants if they have their own playground equipment.
10. Reinforce the wooden tower he built this year for climbing beans. We never anticipated that the plants would be heavy enough to make what we thought was a very sturdy town lean.
11. Put a third fence around the garden. This year I learned that rabbits can chew bunny-sized holes right through chicken wire when they really want a midnight snack.
12. Reset the posts that support the wires in the vineyard. The day after planting the current 4×4 wooden posts in concrete, we read that they should have been placed at an outward slant rather than level, because the weight of the grape vines will pull them inward over time. Yup, it happened.
13. Re-design the pond and waterfall. It remains to be seen whether this will happen in 2012. It’s been on the list a few years now.
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