1. Start dozens of alpine strawberry plants from seed.  Impossible to find in the nurseries near me already started as plants.  Yet for a perennial, incredibly easy to get going in a basement.  Super-useful.  Will grow neatly in sun or semi-shade.  Yields perfumy little berries all summer.  I want these cushiony plants everywhere in empty spaces at the edge of various vegetable gardens.  And you do need them everywhere to be able to pick any amount of tiny strawberries worth having.
  2. Fearlessly make sauerkraut in August. I grow cabbage for sauerkraut, but don’t always time it perfectly.  I tend to leave beautiful big heads of cabbage standing in the garden too long in high summer, on the theory that the basement is just too warm for good sauerkraut.  The cabbages then rot.  A friend who has made sauerkraut for years assures me it all works just fine, even in the steamy days of August, when fermentation is fast.
  3. Throw principles out of window and add aluminum sulphate to the soil around my blueberries.  I never add anything to my soil any more, even organic fertilizers.  I use a pine needle mulch around my blueberries to acidify the soil around them, and, admittedly, I have never really succeeded with blueberries.  But I have just been enjoying a new book Decoding Gardening Advice by Friend of Rant Jeff Gillman and Meleah Maynard.  And they assure me that I will never make my soil properly acidic with pine needles.  Time to grow up, possibly, and use what works.
  4. Plant fruit at the elementary school garden I do. When you’ve got 25 kids so interested in gardening and cooking that they are excited about making chard pie…well, I think they deserve some strawberries and raspberries, too.  
  5. Investigate grants for a lab kitchen at the school.  
  6. Be alert for cutworm.  I lost almost all of my beautiful onion, shallot, and leek seedlings last year.  This year, I’ll put out a few test seedlings to see if I need to plant every one within a paper towel roll barrier.  But I have faith that I’ll have less of a problem this spring.  A piece from the late, great Kitchen Gardener magazine explains that the cutworm moths like to lay their eggs in grass.  And since I made my garden simply by piling compost onto grass, their destructive larvae didn’t have to travel far last year to find some tasty seedlings.  To foil cutworms, the piece suggests a heavy mulch, so the moths can’t find a nice place to lay their eggs.  Done.
  7. Get out a drill and figure out a system of wires that will actually keep my grapes, roses, and honeysuckle attached to my carriage house.  Instead, of course, of drooping on all passersby.
  8. Stake my leaning peach trees.
  9. Get out a post-hole digger and set up some system of support for the blackberries I planted in the alley between my house and the neighbor’s.  It’s only polite.
  10. Paint my porch rockers blue.  Right now, they are that disgusting black color that unpainted oak develops.  I’ve been meaning to paint them for years.  Alas, I don’t enjoy painting as much as gardening, and it always seems to be deferred.
  11. Stop deferring.