After a few early Christmas baking failures, I’ve decided to take a break and put my seeds in order and think about what I need to do differently next year in the garden. With the exception of fava bean extravaganza and the bumper crop of apples, this last year was a little disappointing. Even my kale didn’t grow as well as I expected. However, this may just be a matter of my expectations being too huge, because we did get lots of tasty vegetables, especially zucchini, cucumbers and lettuce.

For the last two years I followed a four-year rotation planting plan which groups vegetables by nutritional requirements. The vegetables are specifically planted in a different part of the garden each year; not only do they get the most benefit from the current soil conditions, but they optimally condition the soil for the set of vegetables that are planted there next. Over the four year course, the soil is renewed.

How this works in real life (if you garden like me) is that you end up having huge empty spaces left in certain beds, which get impulsively planted with something that is not part of the “plan” and then there isn’t space to plant what needs to be planted next.

This year the plan is to take a more temporal approach and plant things in the spring, to be replaced by summer crops and then winter crops. Surely, it can’t be worse than what happened this year. When I figure out what this looks like, I will post it here…wish me luck.

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Today I need to cut the dried hydrangeas off, so that they don’t break in the snow. I removed about 25% of the old wood earlier in the fall, so don’t want any of the remaining branches to snap off. I am also going to start liming the vegetable beds and fertilizing the big hydrangeas.