Another Year, Another Chance to Put Some Fun in Your Plot
By Barbara Damrosch
New Year's resolutions are useless. In fact, I think they're a sort of jinx. Proclamations about losing five pounds or maintaining a perfect garden are doomed to failure because they're too much like homework. "Positive change," as the self-help books call it, happens accidentally when you're fully engaged in life. Progress occurs when you're so caught up in a project that you can't quit.
If your vegetable garden isn't fun anymore, this is a good time to ask why it's not, and what you can do to make it the place that gets your attention. A garden that becomes a burden is easy to avoid, so that by fall it's a disaster you can't face at all. Instead of promising yourself to do better next year, see if you can figure out just what makes that spring-planted Eden slide downhill. Use the tranquil dormant period we're in now to make a new plan. Not somebody else's plan. Yours.
Any garden will depress you if the plants in it fail, and this almost always takes place because of dreadful soil. Only if you've actually seen superb garden loam can you fully appreciate what yours ought to look like, and what its magic effect on your plants will be. Four-star soil is dark and crumbly like chocolate cake. Your fingers can probe it so effortlessly you don't need a trowel. It's full of happy worms and venturesome roots, and you don't achieve it by scattering a bag of 10-10-10 but by adding fertile organic matter -- more than you think you need. Make it a project to round up as much good-quality aged manure as you can find, add some peat moss, dried seaweed and greensand -- a bagged product containing a broad range of trace minerals. Spread these amendments over the garden and till, fork or dig them in thoroughly, whenever weather permits. Instead of struggling, your plants will explode with vigor.
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