How to Get Your Gardening Fix in Winter

December: For Christmas, ask your husband for a book about deadly poisonous plants. (Be sure to insist that you have no plans to actually poison him using knowledge gained from said book. This is crucial.)




Decide to be kind to husband by not growing poisonous plants.

At least, not many.

Obsessively tend to the few indoor plants you have managed to cram into the very few spots of your home that feature decent winter sunlight exposure.

Research optimal local planting times for frost-hardy salad greens.

Read seed catalogs.

January: Pester owners of local garden shops and nurseries by repeatedly asking when their organic heirloom locally-grown seed shipments will arrive.

Create planting time spreadsheets and detailed hand-drawn garden plans which you know you will probably totally ignore at planting time.



Plot seed exchange parties with well-connected foodie gardener friends.

Buy sort-of-organic, NOT heirloom, NOT locally-grown seeds when they show up at the hardware store.

Feel slightly guilty.

Assuage guilt by planning an expansion of your herb garden for more plants, grown from locally-grown organic heirloom seeds, promise to husband to stop applying Moore's Law to garden plots notwithstanding.

Collect food-safe plastic containers to reuse as pots on your indoor light shelf (because yes, you have an indoor light shelf on which to start vegetable plants from seed, because yes, when it comes to tasty homegrown vegetables you are just that hardcore).

Cheapskate Chic Green Lifestyle Tip: Yogurt cups in #5 plastic convert
quickly to seedling-sized pots with the proper application of an ice pick.

During the last weekend of the month, plant your heartiest early greens indoors for later transplant.



February: Grow things! Green things! Edible things! In your basement! Because you are now officially The Type of Person Who Grows Things in Her Basement.

Mmmmm. Lettucey.

Did You Miss Me? Um, Is This Thing Still On?

I have discovered the the problem with blogging about vegetable gardening past the month of, oh, say, July, is that near harvest time, one becomes so busy with the actual gardening that it becomes more and more difficult to find any time for writing about gardening.

Ahem.

That said, this year, at the urging of tens of loyal readers, I have made a resolution to resurrect this little experiment of a gardening blog, and be much more faithful about posting to it.

And if you're wondering what an amateur Midwestern gardener possibly have to write about her vegetable garden in this sort of weather?




Then you, my friend, have not yet been initiated into the club of The Serious Gardening Addict.



Consider this your invitation.