Wow, here we are in 2005. Have you decided which New Year's resolutions you will try to keep? I read an article somewhere claiming that most folks break their resolutions before the new year is a month old. I fit right into that category, but this column is about gardening resolutions, so even if I don't personally follow them, they're sensible ones that all gardeners would do well to follow.
Here's one that requires only a single effort - Don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach when browsing through the seed catalogs. That expression usually applies to food so I suppose I should say don't be carried away by your enthusiasm when you're ordering your plants.
It's so easy to forget the summer's aches and pains as you study Burpee's glossy pages and Park's perfect pictures. You're entitled to daydream about the summer garden, but when you're finally ready to fill in the order blank, just remember to keep it to a manageable size. Of course if you're young and full of energy and have plenty of time to garden, you can indulge, but if you're like me, and feel as if your joints need a shot of WD40 every morning, it's wise to limit your choices.
Do, however, try including at least one new item in your order. It's very easy to get in a rut, sticking with the tried and true plants you've always grown. So this year put a little adventure into your choices. Try a new vegetable. Have you ever grown parsnips? This lowly vegetable can taste totally different when harvested straight from the garden instead of from a shelf in the supermarket. Think about a bored, overfed tiger lying behind bars at the zoo compared to the hungry beast rippling sleekly through the jungles of India.
Ogden Nash once wrote- "The parsnip, children, I repeat,
is simply an anemic beet.
Some people call the parsnip edible.
Myself, I find this claim incredible."
That's just how I used to feel, except that I would have rewritten the first two lines to read The parsnip, children, can you bare it? Is simply an anemic carrot.
I don't grow parsnips every year, only every three or four. They're a winter vegetable, their roots full of carbohydrates which don't convert to sugar until cold weather. If you harvest them too early they won't taste any better than store-bought ones. When fall arrives you must mulch them with hay and pull a few after there has been a good frost or two, then harvest the rest in early spring before their tops begin to grow. Of course parsnips have a strong and distinctive flavor so you may not even like sweet home-grown ones, but then again, you might be surprised.
Here's an easy New Year's resolution. Buy a can of orange spray paint and paint all your trowel handles bright orange so you can find them when you've left them out in the garden. Hank did this to all his tools last spring and now it's a snap to find the lopper or the hammer when he's left them lying around somewhere. I own at least six trowels and yet I've sometimes had trouble laying my hands on even one. Possibly you're the kind of gardener who carefully puts away his tools, but I definitely am the kind who leaves her trowels behind as she jumps from one project to another in the garden.
Because that can of orange spray paint was still around, I just went out and painted all the trowels I could find so I'd have a picture for this column. Perfect time to do it, too, when there's snow on the ground! Now I'll find them all easily, even when I've dumped one on the compost pile in a bucket of weeds by mistake.
You know that expression "Do as I say, not as I do."? Hank always said that to the kids when they were small. Here's a New Year's resolution that I may never get around to, but always wish I had. Write down the names of the flowers and vegetables you plant each summer. It's really nice to be able to know which variety of spinach or snapdragon or strawberry plant was really excellent so you can order it again, or so horrible that you can make sure NEVER to order it again.
These one-time garden resolutions are pretty easy to follow. You'll notice I didn't suggest you resolve to weed the vegetable garden every three days from June until October or dead-head the flower beds every day all summer. But here's a resolution we should all follow. Enjoy your garden every day you're in it, no matter what hoops Mother Nature puts you through. Happy New Year!
