Wintertime, when so much of nature is still, is the gardener’s time to reflect on the past year and make plans for the coming year in the garden. The joy in gardening is that you get an opportunity to start all over again each spring.
This guide provides tips to help you make inspiring resolutions for the new gardening year.
SHOP GARDEN PLANTS & FLOWERS
Be an Inspired Gardener
Try something new this year! Plant a tree, grow roses, add a raised garden bed, emphasize organic methods, or add perennials to your flower beds. Research what’s interesting to you and what works in your location and jump in.
Share the inspiration and love of gardening with children by planting radish seeds. Radishes are the perfect starter vegetable because they grow in cool weather. It takes radishes about 30 days from seedling to harvest. Don’t be put off by memories of bitter radishes from your own childhood. Tiny radishes fresh from the garden are sweet and crisp with just a slightly peppery bite. And the colors are irresistible.
Be an Informed Gardener
A few facts will help you make plans for the gardening year. The date of last frost in spring helps you know when you can safely plant seedlings. Counting backwards helps you time the seed planting for your tomatoes and peppers. Follow this chart to learn your area’s date of last frost in spring.
Knowing your USDA plant hardiness zone will help you refine the plantings in your particular location and is especially helpful in understanding annuals and perennials in your region. Use this
map to determine your USDA hardiness zone.
Be a Frugal Gardener
Gardeners are conscientious consumers who learn from experience the products that yield a greater reward and those that do not. A good place to start is with quality garden soil and potting mix.
Packaged potting mix and garden soil are formulated for proper nutrition and drainage and are worth the investment. If you use a lot of potting mix, it’s easy to mix in your own formula of equal parts good quality garden soil and store-bought or homemade compost.
Quality soil is the foundation to organic gardening. Nourishing the soil gives your plants the very best start. If you’ve had inconsistent results with flowers and vegetables, it may be time to learn about your soil and find out how your improvements to soil will help improve your harvest.
A good place to start is a soil test kit from the Garden Center or your local extension service. Follow through with amending the soil for the best start for your plants.
Be a Time-Saving Gardener
Gardening should be about spending time doing what you love. That can mean working with your hands in the dirt, pruning shrubs, or harvesting vegetables and arranging cut flowers. It usually doesn’t mean loading and unloading mulch and soil bags. Use a mulch calculator to figure how much mulch you need and learn more about mulch delivery.
Be an Organized Gardener
Do you have a work area for gardening? Just like cooks organize all of the pots and pans in their kitchens, having all your tools and materials where you can find them makes you more efficient.
A potting bench, either purchased or made of found materials, can be the catch-all for your gardening materials. Take that tumble of rusty and dirty trowels and clean and store them in a storage caddy made from terra cotta pots. Store bags of soil, moss and perlite in labeled containers.
If you keep all of your gardening supplies in a shed, winter is the time to thoroughly clean out the shed and organize it for the new gardening year. Remove the old tools and leftover bags of mulch and soil and create shed storage space.
Be a Seed-Loving Gardener
Get in on the ground floor, literally, when you become a seed-loving gardener. Grow flowers and vegetables from seed this year. It will give you control over the process, allowing you to start your garden earlier. With successive plantings, you can have many harvests as the weather will allow.
Ever taste the sweetest melon of the season and thought about trying to grow one next year? Pick up expert tips for seed saving. Harvesting seeds from plants is a straightforward process: remove the seeds, soak them in water to remove any vegetable matter, then let dry. Place in labeled envelopes and store in a cool, dry place like a Mason jar.
Be a Prepared Gardener
Plants are adaptable to extreme weather – excessive heat, record rain or no rain for weeks on end – but they can take only so much stress. You can’t control the weather, but you can plan for a successful gardening season no matter the weather.
In the case of drought, drip irrigation systems or soaker hoses covered with mulch will help newly established plants get a good start before summer’s heat.
In the case of too much rain, pay attention to drainage in your garden and make plans early in the season to correct problems.
In the quiet days of late winter, take time to evaluate last year’s garden challenges and successes and make plans for the new year. Looking for gardening tools, plants or seeds to get you started? The Home Depot delivers online orders when and where you need them.
