Let the Gardening Season Begin

The unspoiled freshness of a new year feels a little like spring, so it’s a great time to start thinking about your garden. Taking time to envision the season ahead is an important first step, which can be quite enjoyable and help lead you into a truly inspired season.

Thinking too much about your past successes and failures will probably come automatically, and it’s not very useful during the envisioning phase anyway. Instead, try imagining your way through these guidelines. They work for me.

Try New Things

What can you grow that you’ve never grown before? I am still discovering great edible crops from around the world, and many are easy to grow. Trying new vegetables and herbs keeps gardening fun, and certainly prevents boredom at the table. Celeriac, fennel, endive, escarole, rat’s tail radishes, shall I go on? Commit to trying at least one new vegetable per year, or more if your garden is large or your season is long.

Try new varieties of a vegetable you grow every year. Some you will like and some you won’t, but this is the only way to learn about the incredibly diverse world of veggies. Yes, plump yellow beets really are special, and freshly dug fingerling potatoes fit into the category of food that is so seductively wonderful that its sensual side cannot be denied.

Save Some Seed

It can be incredibly rewarding to grow and save seed from crops that do especially well in your garden. Fresh seed often shows very high germination rates, and of course home grown seed is free. Look for open-pollinated varieties of vegetables that are customarily harvested when the seeds are fully ripe: red peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, cantaloupe, and most dried beans and peas are excellent candidates for novice seed savers.

Keep in mind that with many crops, you don’t need to save seeds but every three years or so, and you can build up a stash of bulging envelopes of seeds in no time. These are great for sharing at springtime seed swaps, which are becoming more popular all over the world.

Steward Your Soil

Hospitable soil can make or break a crop, so designing your season’s soil-improvement program should be as important as choosing your crop list. You will probably need a custom-designed plan based on your soil’s condition and the quality of locally available manure, compost or mulches. All gardens benefit from regular additions of bioactive compost, but beyond this measure your soil may require more organic matter, or deep digging, or pH adjustments, or nitrogen supplementation, or any of a number of other major and minor tweaks. As you learn more about how your soil "behaves" when asked to support certain plants, you can tailor your soil care practices to meet you and your plants’ needs.

I get as excited about locating good quality organic soil amendments as I do about discovering a new type of lettuce I want to try, which is part of what I like about this part of the gardening year. When it comes to the earliest plans for your 2010 garden, constructive daydreaming is time very well spent.

Care to share your dreams for the new season?