Do you start seeds, buy/make/repair garden decorations, that type of thing?

I'm curious what everybody else is doing! : )

marynj

I'm still a month away from starting tomato seeds. Last year I started too early. I want to have smaller transplants for the garden this year. Snow peas and cabbages have already been sown.

The ground here is so wet, it's impossible to dig or do anything. I need a break from rain and ice and cold weather. Soon, I hope.

I'll place my orders for plants.

I've been planning new garden spaces, which entails going through lots of graph paper and staring out the window for long periods of time. When I do get outside, I walk around measuring spaces, or take a tour of the garden with our little black kitty Jasmine and check to see if last year's roses are still in one piece. She's a great helper and follows me everywhere, as I mutter to myself about putting more hay around the plants (LOL)

She's a sweet little kitty that got dumped off by our house and decided to stay. My four year-old niece saw the kitty smelling a plant by the porch last year. She asked the name of the plant and I told her it was Jasmine, which she thought was pretty, so she named the kitty Jasmine :)

I'm planning to teach myself stone carving (mainly letter cutting) this summer, so I bought some tools and a really good instruction book this winter and have been reading up on the subject. No studio to work in so I have to wait for warmer weather to work on stones outside.

Mickie

I also plan what public gardens and nurseries new to me I would like to visit for the upcoming season. Planning a trip to a couple nurseries in VT this year which should be fun!

I started doing some wintersowing for the first time and hope to be able to start some seeds inside too. Thanks to CMK I have a bunch more varieties to start!

And of course this group is great to chase away the winter blues! Especially when folks post pictures of things starting to pop in their gardens already!! Reminds me that spring IS coming to a garden near me!

LL-that's a sweet story about your kitty Jasmine.

Nancy.

Nancy.

This year I am also trying winter sowing.

I also plan for all the things I want to do in this upcoming year in the garden.

I like a break from gardening but only about 2-3 months and then I'm longing for it again.
~Meghan

Jen- I'm with you on the nonexistent gardening shows...whatever happened to the "G" in HGTV....Home and GARDEN television??? I think it's become the "how to buy a new house" television network (LOL)

I always plant fresh daylily seeds that I have collected and put them under lights on the back porch. It is fun to watch them grow and see what they turn out to be. They are never quite the same as the mother plant, but they are beautiful to me....a long wait is involved but I am here anyway so I just do a nursery row in the garden and wait.

I did finally sort and clean out my many shoe boxes of seeds and list them on a spreadsheet. Now I MUST MAKE myself pitch some of the oldest ones. I know they are not good.

Thyme, I hope you win too! I do the same thing. I make lots of lists from various nurseries and then delete them. I remind myself that I am cutting back.....not expanding. I do not need one of everything! So I will restrain myself and just divide what I have. I still long for an Indian Giver daylily though.

I spend lots of time on the internet visiting various forums and Blogs. I can kill a day doing that.

I have worked on a plan for a new orchard/open pollinated corn area that will have to be broken this spring. I have ordered the fruit trees and the corn and squash so it must get done! DH will help me. I am planning an area 80 by 60 feet at first and will slowly expand it for the orchard.

Woody, I need some more clematis supports. I would be very interested in seeing your plans.

Non garden related: I knit, crochet, cook and read a lot.

Sorry to be so long winded.

glenda

I vote they start an all-gardening television network! LOL

A 15"x 6' and and a 20" x 8' column; The triangles are actually copper wire running through screw-eyes so the clematis would have something to wrap their petioles around for support:

This one is a tuteur 3' x 8'. The diagonals are intended to be 1/4" copper pipes - that should be a small enough diameter for the clematis to latch onto I think...

I'm still working out construction details re support, bracing, etc. The columns would probably be painted white and the tuteur a mid-dark olive green. The colums are intended for a narrow bed against the garage, which is why they are so narrow - the bed is only 2' deep!

I've been reading, planning, and dreaming about how to design my new garden and renovate the old. I don't do wintersowing or sow seeds inside any more as we're not home enough to tend them. I'm planning our April trip and will visit a few nurseries then, mostly for fun. I'm trying to decide which perennial seeds I'll direct sow but there are so many it's difficult to choose. I hope I've learned by experience not to plan to do too much or buy too many seeds! I'm no longer trying to be Super-Garden-Woman! LOL Just plodding along til it gets done.

I have other interests besides gardening so winter is a time for other hobbies altho gardening is never far from my thoughts. I've taken out many gardening related books from the library. Other years I've made glass garden totems and glass flowers but have so many I'm not doing that this winter.

So I guess I'm in semi-hibernation as far as gardening is concerned for another couple of months!

You know what I love to do during spring is to build my tutuers or my trellis out of bamboo. I buy lots of bamboo sticks and twine and form many interesting shapes with these things. I also get those old bottle caps or perhaps small pots which I would use to cap the top of the bamboo. I get my inspiration looking at japanese bamboo fencing styles. So each year I get to experiment with new styles.

I make lots of lists of all the plants I want, narrow the list as time goes by; then I buy what is on my "most important" list.

I read and reread everything I can on cottage gardening and general gardening.

I also walk around my borders when the weather is nice and plan for spring.

I have drafted my front yard and planned my "new and improved" garden. Boy do I have my work cut out for me starting next week!

And lastly and most recently, I have been enjoying coming on this forum and interacting with other cottage gardeners. =)

New growth is already appearing on the roses which were pruned back just recently, near the end of January. The freesias are a month ahead of themselves - we had an early hard rain in October that woke things up - so those flower stalks have just begun to raise their heads. It'll be another couple of weeks before they start to open, though. Freesias are my favorite spring flower - fragrant and return reliably!

Last year I grew a bunch of freesias in a pot and didn't realize the colors would cross. They were supposed to be neat waves of red, white and purple. But some of the purple became streaked with white, sort of odd but pretty:

Goodness knows what the freesias will look like this year, LOL. If I get anything interesting in the color mixing, I'll post a 2010 photo in a month or so.

Floweryearth, well, I pared down my list and placed my online orders. I had sworn off mail order just because I have some really good local nurseries and I do prefer to support the locals, but I did find some cool stuff that I had been on a quest for over the past couple of years so I couldn't help myself. Even when it's snowing outside, shopping for plants online somehow makes it all better!!!

Jkom51, I'll take you up on your offer if we get to eat the fresh citrus we pick!! LOL!!

Woodyoak, thanks for posting your plans and detailed info. What a couple of very nice ideas you have. I love your use of the copper. My DH and I aren't very handy...but my dad is! I might have to sign him up for this project.

You said, "Last year I grew a bunch of freesias in a pot and didn't realize the colors would cross". Did you plant freesia corms? If so the colours couldn't 'cross' - that can only happen if you are using seed ie the result of sexual reproduction. Corms are vegetative reproduction and can only produce clones of their parents. Either the purple corms were not from pure purple freesias or possibly there has been some virus introduced. This happens with tulips - it's how the Rembrandt types appear but I'm not sure if it happens with freesias.

Although I pick most of the freesias for the vase, I always miss a few here and there. So it may be possible a few of them hybridized, and when I dug up the clump to put it in the pot, some of the color crosses were included.

According to a search on the web, freesias are very easily raised from seed, so after the corms have been in the ground for over five years it wouldn't be surprising if they began crossing colors.