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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: resolutions

New Year’s non-resolutions

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by sallynex in my garden

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

New Year, planning, resolutions

snowyhouse4

Our house, about this time a few years ago: remember snow?

I have decided to make a New Year’s Resolution. It seems to be the traditional thing to do, so heck, why not.

Here it is:

I hereby resolve: not to make any more New Year’s resolutions.

Like everyone else I seem to break them by about January 5 (if I’m doing well) so there really isn’t any point. I am lucky enough to be able to eat chocolate, drink wine (and my favourite tipple, a good well-brewed lager), and stay up late without any unfortunate side-effects. Or nothing I can’t live with, anyway. So there’s no reason to give any of those up and so I don’t see why I should.

My exercise is built into the day job: if you’re a gardener you don’t need a gym. Nor do you need regular sessions with a psychotherapist, as you’re constantly being reminded a) how good life is, b) how miniscule and unimportant you are in the grand scheme of things which has a refreshingly humbling effect and c) how generally miraculous the natural world is, especially when it’s five millimetres from your nose. It’s kind of hard to be depressed when faced with so much that’s so damn beautiful all the time.

All this saves you a lot of money: when you don’t have to buy gym membership, psychotherapy sessions or comfort shopping you don’t generally speaking have to make résolutions to cut down on credit card bills either.

However: the other good thing about gardening is that it’s always setting you a challenge or two, thereby keeping you on your toes and making sure you don’t go to sleep.

So around this time of year, when you’re thinking about what lies ahead and what’s gone before rather more than is usual, my thoughts often tend towards how I’m going to improve things a little: avoid making the same mistakes, tweak the routine a little, try out a few new things. Call them résolutions if you like: but they’re really just ways of making me a slightly better gardener.

I shall sow my seeds on the first of each month, like I planned to do last year. I was great at it for the first three months, then (as always happens) got derailed in about June and only caught up again in September. It wasn’t the end of the world: but it was annoying and cost me my winter salads.

I shall buy more plants on impulse. I am an awful ditherer when it comes to buying plants. I see them and think, oooh, that looks interesting, maybe that would go here… but I’m not too sure… and then I wander on and forget, and then I get home and curse myself for not picking it up when I had the chance. This year I shall buy lots of plants just because I want to. Which brings me to…

I shall regularly empty the Corner of Shame. Like Dan Pearson, who confessed to such a corner in his lovely book Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City, I have a corner of my garden where plants languish. They arrive there for various reasons: plants I’ve raised from seed just to see if I could, plants people have given me, the surplus plants from an over-enthusiastically sown seed tray, plants I’ve bought on impulse yet don’t have a home to go to in the garden yet… I will empty this corner regularly if only to avoid the reproachful stares I imagine from its mournful inhabitants each time I walk past.

I shall take photos of my garden each month just to show myself how far I’ve come. It’s a habit I got into a few years ago and it pays dividends when I remember to do it. That moment of despair when you feel like you’re paddling away furiously yet nothing is really changing? Dig out the photos of your garden from two or three years ago and you’ll realise what a difference you’ve made.

I shall not beat myself up for all the things I haven’t done. This is my no. 1 priority for the year. No, my garden is not perfect; no, I didn’t get half the things done at the time when I should have done. But late-planted tulips will still bloom; late-sown beans will still fruit; and unfinished paths will just stay unfinished till I’ve got through other, more urgent jobs. Giving myself a hard time isn’t going to make it happen any sooner. So I will be kind to myself and remember that the garden hasn’t got a calendar and a few weeks here or there doesn’t – usually – make much of a difference.

May 2016 be full of sunshine, soft rain and lushly growing plants for you all. Happy New Year!

Indoor gardening

01 Thursday Jan 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

frost, global warming, New Year, parsnips, resolutions

Frost has stopped play. The pond hasn’t defrosted for a week, and part of the lawn is permanently white. As for the allotment… we had to go and buy some parsnips the other day as the ones I’ve grown so lovingly are now concreted in to a rock-hard veg bed (yeah, I know, should have lifted them and heeled them in somewhere sandier, didn’t get around to it).

The BBC’s rather awe-inspiring monthly weather forecast says this will carry on for the rest of January, as it’s caused by a wodge of high pressure that’s apparently “notoriously difficult to budge”. Oh help. I’ll be reduced to making curtains soon.

Anyway, I’m trying to comfort myself with the thought of millions of tiny slugs freezing solid, and meanwhile doing some indoor gardening. This is long overdue: I’m very late in planning my seed order, which I must send off this week as otherwise the spuds won’t be chitting in time. I’ve also, at last, come up with a coherent design for the front garden, and I’ll be measuring up those bits of the back garden I’m not already digging up shortly – all part of the Great Garden Makeover of course. The only trouble with plans is, you then have to put them into some sort of action… which in my case almost always means half-finished projects all over the garden as the summer rush takes over yet again.

I’ve also been making some New Year’s Resolutions to ring in 2009. A bit of a pointless exercise, of course, but I like to see how quickly I jettison them each year. This year, they are more informed at least thanks to all this blogging (mine but more frequently other people’s).

  • I’m going to start a diary (I do this every year. Never got past March yet. At least I know what I was doing in early spring back to about 1975).
  • While I’m taking those photos for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day each month, I’m also going to photograph the whole of my garden, warts and all, as a record of all these improvements I’m making (this of course will be strictly not for publication: all photography found on this blog is a triumph of the macro lens over reality).
  • I’m going to start some of those projects I’m planning (see above)
  • I’m going to finish some of those projects I’m planning (see above)
  • I shall try not to get impatient when my eight-year-old wants to plant tulips in my potato beds, but shall let her with a beneficent smile in the interests of keeping her gardening (and will secretly replant the tulips back in the same spot after harvesting the potatoes).
  • My reading of other people’s blogs shall not take over my working life
  • … and nor will surreptitious trips to the allotment when I should be at my desk
  • I shall cram in as much knowledge as I can about gardening, plants and plantspeople, and hopefully end the year a better gardener.

Right, that’ll do for now. I wish everyone who drops by this blog from time to time all the very best for 2009. Happy New Year!

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