I have this wonderful pruning post that’s almost finished, but I feel it is too serious to match my mood right now. Instead I would like to give a great big shout-out to all those wonderful bloggers who talk lovingly about pouring over seed catalogs. I took some recommendations and ordered some.

Wow.

I have found the joy that comes from pouring over pages and pages of seed catalogs and now I want to start a small farm so I can try everything. (My first gardening love is kitchen gardens. Flowers came after I started growing tomatoes. So I still get way more excited over purple carrots than I do pink echinacea.) This year I will have more than my patio garden.

I am currently in charge of starting a condo garden for my HOA. It will be great. I will have room to grow vegetables, be able to see other people’s vegetable gardens, get rid of some of the massive amount of turf around my apartment, and retain control of the sprinkler system that seriously over watered last year. Downside is that I’m in charge. Last community garden I did I wasn’t the one in charge, just the one that ended up doing everything that no one else would do. (Which was lots of weeding, plot layout, designing an occasional flier and wondering why shovel would mysteriously disappear and reappear. Maybe time I won’t have to weed so much.) I’m mostly excited. So far all I’ve accomplished is a spot picked out. It’s still covered in lawn and snow.

So because I’ll have my own kitchen garden this year, I also have plans to start my own seeds. Again, all I have done is picked the spot to put a seed-starter. This was all decided before I got seed catalogs, and now my plans are cemented. I will not go to Big Box Store and buy transplants. (Bad lazy habit I wish to rectify.) I will grow all of my vegetables from seed and end up with much more interesting plants. That is if I can skip my natural inclination to try everything and decide on the few I want to plant.