Take A Cozy Break While You Look Back and Plan Ahead for the New Gardening Season
As the busy holiday pace begins to fade, one of my favorite things to do is curl up with a London Fog in front of the fireplace and thumb through the piles of colorful garden catalogs that find their way to my mailbox each December. Cold dark days are cheered up with images of brilliant blooms. I place sticky notes on favorites and make a list for Megan to see if Country Gardens & Nursery will have that plant in stock next spring. As I plan and plot next year’s gardening adventures I begin to think about the good and bad of last year's garden. The 2023 Country Gardens & Nursery Guide and Calendar gave me a great way to note things for the coming year based on the success and failures of last year. Here are some of my highlights:
How many tomatoes are too many? Some years are just plain bad years for tomatoes. So I tend to overplant, just in case. Well…. This year proved the need to think that through a little more. Because we put in new raised beds, we were not sure we would get tomatoes since they were going in late so we stacked our odds and planted 18 plants. Included in the varieties were San Marzons. We hoped we would have some for the tomato sauce recipes my brother gathered in Italy last year. Since we had a late fall freeze we had plenty of green tomatoes, so we hung the San Marzanos in our basement to get ripe. We easily had 3 bushels of tomatoes ripen over the fall in the basement. We gave tomatoes, tomato sauce, sun dried tomatoes, tomato jam… away from here all the way to California.
Invasion of the giant pumpkins! This spring I still had random patches in my yard where I have not planted the long term vegetation I want in that space. Those spots are waiting for special plants I won't put in for another year. Knowing that, I decided to plant pumpkin seeds to make a ground cover of the big leaves to keep the weeds down. It worked too well….. Once those little seeds went through the trauma of pushing up through the ground and working so hard to survive I felt obligated to give them drinks when they looked thirsty. That got out of hand. We gave away over 30 pumpkins, and each one weighed 20-80 pounds. I may look for a less invasive “ground cover” next year.
We did not till our soil this spring. This fall when I gently dug in, or when we pulled root vegetables we were in shock at the number of worms and their wonderful worm cities winding through the soil. We are not going to disturb their worm metropolis, as it is the best thing for the garden, thus, no till garden is the plan for next year.
Planning and Canning vs your travel plans- next year I will have to declare harvest season as a time we are home mostly. Planning our summer and fall travel has to work around when everything needs to be harvested.
A rogue garden can be scary. Because we put in new raised beds in late May we rushed planting the garden, without careful planning. I am pretty sure a murk wolf may have been living in the jungle of tomatoes. This chaos does not support the best, healthiest tomatoes. Luckily we had the patch of San Marzanos in the front yard. Lesson for next year, better staking of tomatoes, don't plant so close, and definitely do not overwater!
My brother from Minnesota is an obsessive seed saver. He sent me a wonderful collection of fun seeds for Christmas last year. In them were annual Morning Glory (Ipomoea family). Not to be confused with the invasive Utah version of perennial Morning Glory (Convolvulus arvensis L). A friend of mine plants them along two sides of a huge covered porch at her home, creating a wall of flowers each summer that provide both shade and gorgeous blooms. Annual Morning Glory opens when the first morning rays of sunshine peak over the mountains and close when the full heat of the day arrives. I always loved the intimate space her wall of flowers created, so I planted the seeds along the south side of my porch. This was probably my favorite place early in the morning this summer. My Morning Glory flower curtain provided a sweetest sanctuary to sip my coffee! Definitely on next year's list to plant again.
Overall we had a successful garden season. I believe it is in large part to the soil we brought in to fill beds and landscape areas. The soil was rich and full of nutrients. This fall we added in a ton of mulch that will rot over the next spring and add to the value of the soil. We were blessed with enough flowers and food from our garden that we were able to share the bounty across the neighborhood and with friends.
So pour up a warm cup of your favorite self indulgent beverage, pull out last year's Country Gardens & Nursery Gardening Guide and Calendar, look over your notes and dream about spring.
