I hope everybody had a happy holiday! We stayed at home this year, which was very relaxing. It snowed on Christmas Eve and Kevin, #1 Son and I had a snowball fight in the morning. Kevin bought me some new gardening gloves and a kneeler/seat. (I still feel young, but after an hour or two in the garden my knees feel old.) A few days after Christmas, Santa visited again (okay, it was the postman). The first seed catalogs of 2013 came in the mail!
January is for planning and dreaming. I've got more space to garden in this year. We finally put in a third bed. We borrowed my Dad's mini-rototiller and got it done the weekend before Thanksgiving. Notice how green the grass is. It's been a mild fall. Yay for global warming! I filled the bed with compost from our local landfill. 80 lbs of compost for $4.80! You can't beat that. Kudos to Frederick County for having such a great recycling program!
January is also for New Year's resolutions. I'm trying to learn from last year's mistakes (okay, these are mistakes I make every year.)
I plant WAY too much lettuce. It all matures at once, and we can't keep up with it. I swear the slugs ate more of it than we did. So... less lettuce. However, I am going to order some Little Gem lettuce seeds from the Territorial Seed Company. Aren't they sweet?
No more Tomato Envy. I'm going to plant some hybrid tomatoes this year. In the past, I've gone with all heirlooms and I've had very small yields. Heirlooms taste great, but they don't always produce a lot of fruit. Burpee has a Brandy Boy Hybrid that is supposed to be the best of both worlds: flavor and yield. Sounds good to me.
I'm going to buy/build the right supports. In the past, I've rigged supports for beans, cucumbers, and peas out of scrap wood and wire fencing. Unfortunately, it's really hard to harvest when you're trying to reach around splintery wood and sharp wire ends. No more! I've already got some really heavy-duty tomato towers that my Dad found. Maybe we can find something similar for peas, pole beans and cucumbers. Anything is better than splinters and tetanus shots, right?
What are your gardening resolutions? Are you going to try something new this year?
