YORKTON – Happy New Year, gardeners! Can you believe it? 2026. I wish you good health and good gardening in the year ahead!
As we look at gardening ideas, it is like being in a candy store! What to try, what to try?
A friend once told me that she was so happy with her planters that she was going to plant everything exactly the same again. I was glad for her success, but part of the fun of gardening is making a plant safari to the greenhouses and seeing what is new and exciting in the gardening world, and making those plants our “new favorites”! Nothing wrong with “old favorites”, but how can we resist trying those beautiful plants that have been years in the making before they reach us?
Not that we all don’t have our favorites, I know we do. Gardening is about what brings joy to you. And I guess that reinforces one of those “life lessons” that we always learn from gardening: to savor what we have right now and enjoy it to the max, because we don’t know how long it will last or if it will ever be like that again.
That’s enough philosophical thinking for now! We’re on the brink of the New Year, and it seems to me that once New Year’s is past, time picks up speed again and spring is a lot closer than it was! Time to look forward with anticipation!
Do you have any gardening resolutions? Let’s make a list together! Number one: we will try something new, even if it is just one plant. Something new that we have never grown before.
Number two: we will try a new color scheme, even if we do it only in one planter. The gardening world is full of astounding color, and as Mom always used to say, “if it grows together, it goes together”. So let’s mix it up and enjoy it! We don’t have to limit ourselves to the same colors all the time.
Number three: let’s try to be greener gardeners by somehow incorporating composting in our garden practises, even if it’s very small scale and all we are doing is crushing our eggshells and scattering them in our garden or chopping up banana peels and burying them in our planters or in the garden. We can always make our soil better!
Number four: let’s make the most of our gardens or decks as extra outdoor living space. Barring the most extreme or wet weather, we can sit and enjoy our gardens every day, even if all the time we have is for a quick cuppa coffee! What’s that saying: there’s no bad weather, just bad clothing choices!
Number five: let’s make it a point to try and learn something new about gardening. We can always learn something new. Gardening is a wonderful world of interesting new ideas and interesting people who can tell us about them!
I can’t wait to see what we will find this spring! I have always had a fondness for unusual plants: the weirdly blotchy coleus, the odd colored grasses, or plants with big, tropical-looking leaves. I enjoy putting unique combinations together in planters. My thought is, if it doesn’t look as I hope, I won’t do it again. But sometimes it looks even better!
Each year, we have a clean slate with our gardens, to let our enthusiasm and imaginations go and grow wild! What fun it all is! Thank you to our friends at YTW. Visit the hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca
Happy New Year, dear gardeners! Have a great week!
