I took a tour of the backyard with my toddler son on a cool Saturday morning and found that, as I had suspected, spring is here. Some of my garlic sprouts are an inch or two above the soil, a few of my earliest varieties of crocuses are blooming (the deep violet ones are always first), the tulip leaves are starting to unfurl gracefully, and the early native perennials (like lupine, delphinium, and flax) are sending up their first few leaves.


Garlic sprouts on a foggy morning

All these things point to a need for me to get organized and start working. When starting the season, the first thing I always do is sit down on the couch with my husband and re-hash the previous year. He likes knowing that his opinion is important when it comes to gardening, because he's in charge of the most backbreaking aspects (like digging potato holes). He sometimes says surprising things, like "Can we plant more lettuce this year?" and so I write down 'add 1 more row of lettuce.' He makes some statements every year, and like his constant "I want bigger tomatoes" statement. I know, dear, I want bigger ones too, but you gotta remember we live in Montana and do not have a greenhouse.

Now that you know how my marriage and gardening life come together, here's a quick reminder of what you might get started on right now.

Do the gardening talk with your gardening partner, if you have one. Make sure to cover these topics:

• mistakes (perceived or real) in type and quantity of what you planted last year. Were these mistakes fixable, or were they just you learning about your climate, soils, time constraints, etc?


• Additions ("I want more lettuce") or subtractions ("do we really need a four foot row of dill?") from last year


• Infrastructure changes: New watering system? Thinking about raised beds?


• Budget concerns, especially if you are considering major overhauls like raised beds or yards of new soil

Create a list of everything you want to grow. Organize it by:

• Seeds you already have (most are good in the packet for 3 or 4 years, if kept cool and dry)


• Seeds you need to buy


• Starts that you can realistically do from home with some seeds and a sunny window


• Starts that you need to buy from a garden store or farmer's market

Start collecting reused containers for your starts, poking several large holes in the bottom of each for drainage. Both smaller (8 oz.) containers (good for smaller starts like lettuce and basil) and larger ones (for tomatoes, etc.) are great.

So far, in my house, we've come to a few key agreements for the '09 gardening season. For one thing, our new 40' x 10' garden, which has been slumbering for a year under a murderous layer of black weed smothering plastic, needs to be fenced to keep out the dog and chickens. This huge (about threefold) increase in gardening space will largely be taken up with low maintenance, high yield favorites like zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and potatoes. That sort of crop selection will keep the increase in workload down to a minimum. We've also agreed that we need to be more aggressive in our mulching strategies for the veggies - the best yields last year were in the parts of the garden that had a weed cloth and hay mix used for weed smothering.


The new garden, as partially exposed and seen from above

So now that you have your to-do list, go for it! We'll be gearing up in the next week or so with a lot of tips for growing all kinds of veggies, basic garden tasks, and more here on Gardenaut, so don't be intimidated - if you've wanted to start a small home garden, dive in and we'll be with you every step of the way.

As Mariah mentioned in her recent post, amaryllis are a nearly foolproof way to enjoy vibrant color in the dead of winter - or in my case, in that maddening early-spring period when your plants are just taking TOO LONG to wake up after their winter's nap. In another week or two, these guys - pictured here in early March:



. . . will look like this:



It's not difficult. After you enjoy your blooms, cut the stalks back to about 6 inches, but leave the foliage alone. Continue to water the bulbs and keep them in a sunny spot. When it's quite warm (June) you can bring them outside; I used to plant them in the garden, but now I just bring the whole big pot outside and nestle it among the daylilies that grow like mad on the side of my house. Or you can just leave them on your windowsill, but the leaves do grow to be rather unsightly - they get very long and then buckle into a mess.

When summer is over, bring the bulbs back indoors and repot them. (The dates here are quite loose; last year I forgot about mine until several frosts had passed, and I was sure I had killed them, but they bounced back admirably.)

This next part sounds cruel, but it makes more sense when you understand that the amaryllis grows naturally in the desert. You need to duplicate the desert environment: withhold water, light and heat (though don't let it freeze; an unheated basement is ideal) to allow the bulb to enter the period of dormancy that will allow it to replenish itself and bloom again. I set my pot in a corner of the basement and drape an opaque trash bag over it.

About 6 weeks later (again - very loose dates!) cut off the dead foliage, water thoroughly, and set in a sunny spot. Do not water it again until, several weeks later, you begin to see some wide green shoots poking through the soil. It never fails to amaze me, but they come back with gusto. Every year the bulbs grow larger, and after 3 to 4 years they will divide, giving you an extra bulb to add to your collection. Or, if you're feeling generous, give it to a friend - but don't forget to tell her how to take care ot it!

I have a relative, who shall remain nameless, who gardens but has a naughty little habit. He cannot resist bringing back seeds, roots, and cuttings from his travels, even if his travels are out of the country. He tends to know what he's doing, and refrains from bringing back known noxious plants, but I can't help wondering if the next kudzu lurks in his backyard. As nervous as his habit makes me, he does get a lot of interesting plants for no money (if one ignores the airfare for the moment). This is something any gardener can appreciate.

As much as we all enjoy perusing our favorite seed catalogs, I do wince every year as I see how much I shell out for seeds. To make matters worse, one often ends up with more seeds of a certain type than could reasonably be used in a hundred years. Who really needs or wants two hundred basil plants? It makes a lot more sense to share seeds, taking a little of this and that from friends in exchange for your own surplus.

I went looking for a national seed exchange that could help me find free seeds for interesting plants that are suitable for my region. What I discovered is that there are more seed exchanges that one can count, but none of them are very useful. It's more like an eBay-esque free for all, minus the bidding. Sites such as GardenWeb do a decent job of breaking it down by region and plant. BlossomSwap offers both national and botanical categories, as well. The Emily Compost seed exchange scores points for a catchy name. There are numerous, almost countless, other seed and plant exchange sites, but they all seem to suffer from the same limitations:

1. A surplus of things you don't want - the same plants you already have that produce seeds by the ton.


2. Mandatory registration, which means to reach a wide audience, one would have to register and monitor a lot of different seed exchange communities.


3. A complete absence of any of the trappings of the modern Web, such as decent searching, tagging of posts to allow easy sorting, or RSS feeds for posts with certain keywords or tags.

If you're a Web developer, gardener, and love seed exchanges, perhaps this could be your next project. But this may just be one of those instances where the Web, as nifty and handy as we all find it, really cannot replace a local community of gardeners. It's a lot of fun trading seeds and plants with neighbors and people in the community outside your door. See a plant you like in someone's yard? Use it as an opportunity to meet someone new and ask for some seeds or a cutting.