Happy New Year, gardeners! I wish you good health and good gardening in the year ahead: may your flowers bloom vibrantly, your veggies produce prolifically, and may you find the most exciting new plants to fill your planters!
A dear friend told me that she was so pleased with her planters this year that she wanted to do the same thing again next year! But part of the fun of gardening is waiting till spring and seeing what is new and exciting in the gardening world, and making those plants our "new favorites"! And I guess that reinforces one of those "life lessons" that we always learn from gardening: to savor what we have right now and enjoy it to the max, because we don't know how long it will last or if it will ever be like that again.
That's enough philosophical thinking for now! We're on the brink of the New Year, and it seems to me that once New Year's is past, time picks up speed again and spring is a lot closer than it was! Time to look forward with anticipation!
Do you have any gardening resolutions? Let's make a list together! Number one: we will try something new, even if it is just one plant. Something new that we have never grown before.
Number two: we will try a new color scheme, even if we do it only in one planter. The gardening world is full of astounding color, let's try it and enjoy it! We don't have to limit ourselves to the same color all the time: instead of red, choose purple! Why not?
Number three: let's try to be greener gardeners by somehow incorporating composting in our garden practises, even if all we are doing is crushing our eggshells and scattering them in our garden, or chopping up banana peels and burying them in our planters or in the garden. We can make this small change on any scale!
Number four: let's make the most of our gardens or decks as extra outdoor living space. Barring the most extreme or wet weather, we can sit and enjoy our gardens every day, even if all the time we have is for a quick cuppa coffee!
Number five: let's make it a point to try and learn something new about gardening. Just because we go from year to year with a system that works doesn't mean that we can't learn something new. Gardening is a wonderful world of interesting new ideas and interesting people who can tell us about them!
Number six ties in to number five: we have amazing gardeners and greenhouses here. They are a wealth of knowledge, so don't be shy to ask and learn about something new.
I can't wait to see what we will find this spring! I have always had a fondness for unusual plants: the weirdly blotchy coleus, the odd colored grasses, or plants with big, tropical-looking leaves. I enjoy putting unique combinations together in planters; I was absolutely enthralled by the wonderful planters that the City of Yorkton had this year! They were amazing! I looked at the combinations and thought to myself that I wouldn't have thought to put those things together, and yet they worked and went together in the most beautiful way!
As we do each year, we have a clean slate with our gardens, to let our enthusiasm and imaginations go and grow wild! What fun it all is!
Happy New Year, dear friends! Have a great week!
