Thursday, February 21, 2008

On Pondering the Lessons of Last Year's Garden

The seeds are coming, the seeds are coming! I love this time of year. It all starts with getting the catalogs....WOW! I requested SO many catalogs, I just could't help myself. Then the browsing through all those seed catalogs and the lists.. oh the lists.. what worked last year? and what do I want to add for this year? Where will I plant things? How will I rotate repeat crops from last season? It is quite a process and one that I really enjoy, an annual reflection time and a chance to start all over again. A gray day like today has me pondering the successes and lessons from last summer's garden. I like this chance to review the past and look forward to the future.
I ordered from Johnny's, Gurney's, Cook's Garden, Territorial, Burgess, and Wood Prairie. I think that almost everything that I have ordered is finally here except for the fruit trees and strawberries.
I decided that it was time to start my mini-orchard this year. So I'll be putting in three bush cherries, one 5-in-1 dwarf apple tree, and one "fruit cocktail" dwarf tree. The fruit cocktail tree has nectarines, peaches, plums, and apricots all one one tree... it seems a little weird to me but interesting.. so we will see how it does. Hard to imagine how cool it will look!

Last year I had SO many volunteer tomato plants from the year before that one of the things I decided to do this year is cut back on the number of tomato plants that I start. The volunteers were so productive and healthy that I want to leave room for them in the plan for this year. I have added a new variety or two and we'll just see. I also plan to plant the basil along with the tomatoes again as we did not see a single horn worm. I had read that basil would repel them.. and it seemed to work. I was amazed as I never in my life grew tomatoes that did not attract dozens of horn worms!
Look for more pondering in my next post.

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