Garden resolutions

A new year always seems like a clean slate, filled with fresh opportunities to try new things and learn from past mistakes. For the gardener, winter is an especially good time to reflect upon the past, catch up on notebooks, organize photos and plan for the year ahead. With a new calendar year begun, and a new garden season coming up, it seems a perfect time to turn to a fresh page in the garden journal and decide on this year’s resolutions.

New Year’s resolutions may seem cliché, and admittedly they are not much use when tossed into the drawer and forgotten, but when carefully considered they can actually help to keep one focused on ones’ goals for the short and long term. Writing them into the garden journal along with the daily or weekly seasonal notes gives them substance and clarity and almost guarantees that they will be reviewed often.

So, where to begin? It seems clear that if you haven’t started a garden journal, that would be a great place to start. I resolve to pay more attention to my journal. While I do have a notebook for my seed-starting and transplanting dates, and another for vegetable garden plans, and yet another for the summer camp where I garden, I’ve found that I don’t have a place where general garden goals and plans all come together. This winter I’ve been asked to create a portfolio of sorts to showcase my experiences in different garden situations, so I’ve been going through 20 years of my photos and plans. Discovering that there are missing pieces to my garden story is frustrating, but sorting through the photos has been fun, watching the gardens come alive in fast-forward. What a sense of accomplishment!

My next resolution would probably have to do with the vegetable garden. It seems like a lot of what I plant goes past its prime before being harvested. I’ve really got to get out there more often, sowing smaller batches of seed more often to avoid the avalanche of produce becoming ripe all at once.

Speaking of food, learning more about wild foods would be an interesting goal. I know, for example, that purslane is edible, and an excellent source of vitamins, yet I continue to pull it out as a weed, dumping all that nutrition onto the compost pile. Pulling dandelions all summer makes me crazy. What better revenge than to eat them? Elderberries and low-bush blueberries grow wild everywhere around here, as do wild strawberries. A morning or two now and again spent wild-crafting would be pleasant as well as productive.

These are a few of my resolutions for the new year. There will probably be others, some unrelated to the garden, and I have no qualms about changing goals or creating new ones later in the year as the need arises. Perhaps you too will take a moment during this slow, post-holiday season to reflect upon years past and plan for the new year ahead. Another adventure is about to begin.