Yes, this is a gardening blog, and yes it’s January. I told a friend at work about my blog today and how it was back on line after several months and he asked, “Have you done any gardening lately?” I guess implying that perhaps the lack of a gardening blog through the winter is no great loss. What he doesn’t realize is that we who love to get our hands dirty (which is not actually me, because I’m obsessive about using gloves, but you know what I mean) need to look forward to the time when the snow will be gone and we’ll be watching the tulips come up. Now that it’s January and we’re officially past the shortest day of the year (almost a month past it, already!!), every day the light stays a little longer and it encourages us to start dreaming.
In fact, it’ll soon be time to start getting some seedlings going under grow lights (those who are lucky enough to have such things) and that means planning. Planning is part of the fun of gardening, especially in the winter when we can’t do much else. Planning means combing the gardening sites for unusual new plants, dreaming about where we should dig a new bed and what to put in; wondering whether this will be the year of the pond; will a new stone path or a trellis get built? Will we grow vegetables? All of that stuff. Today the world is our oyster, we have all the far off spring, summer and fall to do whatever it is we’re dreaming about now. There are no limits to what we might accomplish this year.
To help with your dreaming here’s a link to an extensive gardening site called Dave’s Garden. The link will take you to a page with an article on winter pruning. (This is for you, Elizabeth!) I’m not sure how many people around here would actually get out and prune in winter (I’d be curious to know), but there are people out west of the Rockies who probably could. Dave’s Garden site is very extensive, almost like a Ravelry site for gardeners. (Oh, you don’t know Ravelry? Not a knitter, huh? OH, well…) Dave’s Garden’s e-newsletter arrives in my inbox every Monday and I often think I’ll just take a glance and I end up reading the whole thing.
Happy Dreams, Fellow Gardeners!
I love to hear from you!