A Gardening Life – January 8
Should gardeners make New Year’s resolutions specifically aimed at the landscape? Or are the usual losing weight, getting more exercise and spending less time on Facebook enough to handle? Jim Long, a fellow garden writer in Missouri, published a post on gardener’s resolutions that prompted me to think about how I need to be more purposeful as a gardener in the coming year.
Be it resolved that in 2013:
1. I will get all the plants I’ve started from seed into the ground by mid-August. No more feeling guilty as I water these small pots in August, September and October thinking, “I really need to get these planted.” No more racing around in November finding a place to put them and invariably sticking them in the wrong spot just to get them out of the pots before winter.
2. I will put more ornamental kale in one of the flower borders in September. Here that, self? More. When a plant is so colorfully purple from fall into January, why on earth do you continue to limit yourself to five of them?
3. I will continue to question long-held and repeated gardening beliefs. Just because it seems to make sense, or it’s what gardeners have always believed, doesn’t mean that it’s true or the entire answer. This paper on Rhododendron leaf curl, for example, or this talk on GMO plants remind me to keep an open and ever-enquiring mind.
I have a good chance of being successful with numbers 2 and 3 but I’m not sure about the likelihood of keeping resolution #1. Yet we remember the old saying: Where there is a garden, there is hope.
I’ve always told people that the curling, drooping Rhododendron leaves were a way to conserve water in the wintertime, but Erik Nilsen’s paper makes me think otherwise.
Sharing the Wealth
Other bloggers who have posted 32013 gardening resolutions:
An Obsessive Neurotic Gardener makes these important resolutions after stating that such postings are “amateurish and a waste of time. In terms of a blog post, they are so cliche and lack originality.”
Shauna Coronado urges everyone to “Go Green” and think healthier by doing one small thing every week.
Gene Bush of Munchkin Nursery & Gardens declares “This is going to be the year that I ‘geterdone.’ ” in his beginning of 2013 post.
Geri Laufer moved to a new property in 2011…read her New Year’s resolutions for this new garden.
