We Are Officially In Like a Lion

Though I wouldn't hold my breath for March going out like a lamb. March is kind of a miserable month in upstate New York, in my experience. It seems like it should be spring, but March is almost invariably more a winter month. It's very dispiriting.

So let's talk about gardening! Because that's a spring-y kind of thing, and we all need to be thinking Spring Thoughts right now in the dregs of winter.

We ordered our seeds some time ago. Not too many this year, as we ordered a lot last year that can still be planted this year. The garden is, by necessity, going to be a little scaled back this year. We always rotate the location of our crops, and that's going to be even more important this year since we're following The Year of the Blight. Because a lot of the garden space last year was taken by the blighted tomatoes and potatoes, our options for growing locations for those crops will be more limited this year. Not to worry, though. We'll still have double-digit numbers for tomato plants, and I'm sure you'll see more than one post in which I bitch about the damn potato hilling.

You know you would miss the hilling bitching.

Also this year, I will have a small child, which may cramp my gardening style a bit. I'm hoping that by the time the garden is in full swing, Cubby will be big enough to bring out with me and put on a blanket in the grass while I work. We'll have to see about that, though. Cubby often has his own ideas about how things should go. A little dictator, that one.

ANYWAY.

I'm not going to be starting a whole lot of seeds this year, either, as I discovered a local nursery that has a lot of really good seedlings for most of the things I want to grow. I will start some of the varieties of tomatoes we really liked last year, like the Black Krim and the Stupice. And I'll be starting some eggplant seeds in a couple of weeks. Let's hope I manage to not kill them in the cold frame this year.

Modest hopes this year, indeed.