December Gardening Tips.
One would not think that we would be talking about gardening here in the northern hemisphere. But we are and the topic is centered around seeds and the selections of seeds for your garden for the upcoming season.
The main point of seed selection is first to determine just what you want to grow. What types of products have a tendency to grow in your area with ease and what produce you will actually use! Many times it is easy to grow things that you aren't likely to use, yet, those that you would likely use, many times are the hardest to grow. Weird I know, but that is the truth many times. A lot of times when we make the seed selection, we just select all willy nilly and have no rhyme or reason to our selections and choices. So for a better focus, let us talk about how to focus better. Perhaps picking a theme will be more to your liking. For example, do you like salsa? OK, if so then let us take that as a theme. With this theme in mind, you would make a list of the ingredients that you would like in your salsa. Then take that list and break it down into ratios, for example. If you were to use a lot of tomatoes, then you would select a good salsa tomato and then decide the percentage of the salsa mix that would require tomatoes. Next might be Peppers, how many peppers do you need? That would help you to decide just how many of those plants you would need. You would continue down the list of what you need and then compare that to what you could likely grow. Next, you would make a selection of the seeds. You can look up and do a search of the various seed catalogs and companies that offer seeds. You may simply go to your nearest garden center and get what you need from there. I will list several factors to consider as we move along in this discussion that would be good to consider.
Perhaps the first thing to consider is the days to maturity of your selection. This is important so that you can coordinate the harvest time of each one of your plants. That would help you to know when to plant each selection so that the harvest time would be having each plant maturing and giving it's prime harvest at the same time so that you can make your best end result. If you want to be less complicated, then you would just make a few selective choices. In this area, one might just say, hey, I want a bunch of pickles. Then I want some corn, then I want.. just pick a selection here. Some people only want to do a single thing, such as doing a bunch of pickles. Then move on to something different. So with this idea, then you would make selections that would have a staggering maturity time, based on planting times and maturity dates and times. There is nothing wrong with this idea. Another idea would be to just plant a few of the selections that you would just choose to eat as they mature. Some people are not interested in preserving their harvest, as they prefer to just use up their harvest as it becomes available. There is nothing wrong with any of these ideas. What is important is that you plant what you want and enjoy doing it.
Some exciting ideas that you could consider are planting something that you are not accustomed to planting or consuming. One of these is flowers. More specifically, eatable flowers. This seems to be the new exciting thing to do. The benefit of this is that it helps to feed you emotionally and not just physically. Food is not just a physical thing, eating is also an emotional thing. So this is helpful. Not only does it help you nutritionally, but it also helps to control pests in your garden. If you are at a loss when it comes to understanding the eatable flower aspect, then the seed catalogs will be helpful here. Many of them will include discussions on this subject. Of course, if you can't get the information you feel you need from those sources, you are always free to ask here and those answers will likely be found.
This should provide you with enough work to do to keep you busy until next month's gardening tips. Thank you for your interest and we will see you in the new year.
