To-do list tyranny

Gardening - as it is practised in my neck of the woods - requires a little bit of forward planning. Crop rotation, regular watering, fertilising and weeding, sowing and transplanting, all must be done at their proper time (-ish). If you happen to be an inveterate list-maker like me, this results in the annual love-hate job of penning your yearly to-do list, marking on which weeks (or moon phases, if you're into that kind of thing, which I am not) each seed or plant will need attention.

I compiled a list last  weekend of jobs for this year, and I do want to share it with you and make a permanent record of it for my own purposes.  However posting it in one go could bring on a panic attack, so I am going to unveil it in chunks instead. So here's January and February. (If you think this is daunting, wait until I  get to March.) Where possible, I've linked through to the site where the seeds were bought. I know gardening is supposed to be pleasurable, but once you're caught by the tyranny of knowing that your summer crop of tomatoes will taste far better than the bullet-like offerings of your local supermarket, it's hard to avoid a planting scheme that would dwarf the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Hence the tough schedule I sketch out. Naturally, things don't always run exactly to course, and that sometimes works to one's favour. Last year I planted some early red cabbages about three months too late and they thrived, whereas planted at the proper time they would probably have died in the waterlogged soil. So let's just say this list is, um, flexible.

January
Sow physalis in heated propagator; plant out shallots; mulch blackcurrants and raspberries; tidy strawberry bed; finish compost trenches on allotment where squash will grow; weed incessantly

February
Weed incessantly; sow green and purple globe artichokes in heated propagator; sow beetroot carillion; sow broad beans on allotment, sow Meconopsis grandis; sow aubergine mixed in heated propagator; sow cabbage marner early red on allotment; sow pepper sweet hungarian wax in heated propagator; move compost bin from garden to allotment; renovate at least one of three garden beds that still need to be worked on; sort fixings for honeysuckle support on back fence in garden; weed some more

Comments

[Kathy]

January: Watch it snow. Hope for gardening catalogs and magazines in the day's mail. Order plants and seeds. February: See January, except try not to order any more plants and seeds.

[Gabrielle Adams]

In January I do my winter sowing, (www.gardenweb.com has a good forum on this) and do as Kathy does, order way too many seeds, just hankering for the time when the ground dries out enough to be worked. EBay is a great way to order excess seeds without breaking the bank. I just gave away more then a hundred seed packets to my neighbor, to try and nip this obsession in the bud, or rather prune it back to a manageable size!