Snow may be on the ground and temperatures well below freezing, but backyard gardening enthusiasts are already looking ahead to spring. If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to start making your gardening plans for the upcoming season. Here are a few tips to get you going:
- Gardening Goals: What do you want to grow? Annuals, perennials, vegetables, fruits? The options are limitless, but your space and time are not. Determine how much space you have available in your garden, what you’d like to achieve with your gardening (beauty, food, or both), and how much time you are willing and able to put into creating and maintaining the garden. Your answers to these questions will help you immensely as you go forward with your garden plans.
- Seed Selection: If your garden plan includes starting indoors with seedlings, start browsing seed catalogs now, and place your orders before the end of January. When it’s time to transplant your seedlings into the garden, they’ll have had enough time to develop.
- A Place for Gardening: If you don’t already own a hobby greenhouse, you should consider obtaining one, especially if you want to extend the growing season and have a dedicated place for gardening activities. Hobby greenhouses come in all sizes, so starting small is a good way to get a taste for what greenhouse gardening can offer. Greenhouses provide a gardener with much more flexibility in terms of what can be grown and when. They are especially attractive to gardeners who live in cooler climates where the growing season is shorter.
Heater. That delicious warmth makes December dinners al fresco an inviting idea. With their traditionally sleek and contemporary appearance, though, patio heaters don’t always appeal to homeowners who like to maintain a consistent decorating style in their outdoor spaces. The smart (and sneaky) solution is a patio heater that looks like a beautiful floor or table lamp.