Winter, the Most Dangerous Time for Gardeners

 

Winter is the most dangerous time of the year for gardeners. Why? Because it’s the time of year when you can be tempted to make all sorts of crazy big gardening plans without keeping in mind that you don’t have a staff of 20 to tend the garden.

I don’t know about you, but in the fall, I’m exhausted. I love my garden, and gardening is one of my favorite hobbies. But by October, I’m just tired of it. Tired of weeding, harvesting, battling insects, the list goes on. When it gets too cold to work outside, I’m relieved that I can spend my Saturdays cleaning the house instead of weeding. That tells you how tired I am.

And then comes January. Christmas is over. The decorations are packed away. The pretty gardening catalogs arrive in the mail with their glossy pages filled with photos of intriguing plants. I’m restless. I’ve read all the books I’d saved up during the months when gardening took precedence. Most of the big household chores are done; I’ve cleaned the refrigerator, organized the pantry, shined the glass in my glass front kitchen cabinets until they sparkle, and I’ve reorganized the hall closet so that I can actually find my mittens. The garden beckons, but the ground is frozen. I’m reduced to perusing the pages of Virginia Gardener and my favorite catalogs and dreaming big dreams.

This is the dangerous time, so beware!

This is the time when, as you stop at Wal-Mart for milk, bread and eggs, you wander past a seed display, and think to yourself, “Well, I need zinnia seeds…and maybe a few sunflower seeds…and, oh heck, let me buy some more.”

And then you’ve got 20 packages of zinnia seeds in your cart and a dozen more.

 

Or you’re flipping through a catalog and spy a really interesting design for a tomato cage. (For new gardeners, that’s a support to hold up the branches of a tomato plant). You think to yourself, “Well, I’ll just try to make one out of that big old pile of scrap lumber in the basement.”  A few splinters, bruised thumbs and mistakes later, you’re in the aisle of your favorite home center piling your cart with expensive lumber, hinges, brass screws and the works. And on the way out, you grab a few more seed packages. Because, hey, seeds.

Did you bother to check on what seeds you saved from last year? No, of course not. Did you do a vitality check to see if what you did save is still useful? Of course not.

The pretty seed packages beckon.

Can you tell, gentle reader, that I’m really speaking to myself here? I fell right into the dangers of wintertime this past weekend. I do the grocery shopping after church on Sunday, and as I pushed my cart through the wide aisle of my local Wal-Mart, I couldn’t help but glance into the garden center department. Big mistake. Too tempting. But they had seeds – seeds! And starter onions. And more!

I ended up buying about $20 worth of gardening supplies, which while not exactly breaking the bank, wasn’t on my shopping list either.

Winter is the most dangerous time of year for gardeners, that’s for sure. To spare YOU the dangers of over spending, over extending yourself and creating havoc in your gardening workshop, shed or garage, I’m going to put together a new series of posts here on Home Garden Joy called “How to Plan Your Dream Garden.”

Hopefully, you won’t succumb to the winter danger like I did, but if you do?

At least you’ll have a plan!

See you tomorrow, gardeners!