Making the Grade
I’ve always believed that the best way to know where you’re going is to understand where you’ve come from. As we prepare to turn the page on another year we wait with anticipation for catalogs to arrive with the promise of what’s to come next year. Yet, how do we properly determine what to order unless we understand our gardening successes and near misses? This is why I find it useful to put my garden under the microscope and realistically assess “who made the grade.”
There is no ideal or perfect way to assess how your garden has performed in the past year. Some people literally use letter grades like you would get in school, with A’s and B’s being plants or tasks that worked well and should be repeated while C’s, D’s and heaven forbid F’s require some real thought about what went wrong and can the outcome be changed if we try again next year. I’m going to share some suggestions on how you might go about evaluating your garden.
A good place to start is to evaluate your watering system; after all, water does play a critical role in the success or failure of our gardens. Are there areas of your yard that are too wet or too difficult to keep moist regardless of how much additional attention you pay to them? Do you need to consider adding raised flower beds to help with drainage problems or a drip irrigation system to make watering a little easier? If you have an underground sprinkler system, do you need to adjust the heads to improve the efficiency of your system? Did you find yourself watering too much in the evening which led to disease problems?
The next part of your yard to assess may be your soil. Perhaps a soil test is needed to determine if lime or other nutrients need to be added. Do you have beds that may need compost or do you need to consider rotating the crops in your vegetable garden? This is also a good time to consider if new flower beds are in your future and to start planning where they should go and how large they should be.
Finally, you’ll want to evaluate the plants themselves. How did each variety that you planted perform? For example, did one type of tomato produce more fruit than another? If one did not produce as well as you thought it might is there a reason that this occurred? Maybe you should try it in a sunnier location next year or provide better physical support to the plant? Maybe you tried to grow a flower from seed but weren’t very successful this year, would purchasing seedlings instead of planting seed improve your chances of success?
These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself and I am sure you’ll come up with lots more. If you have suggestions that you can share with your fellow gardeners please post them on our Facebook page.
