Planning in January

It's the perfect time of year to plan for an even bigger & better season in 2010.

This will be the first year that I will implement a four year crop rotation plan. I'm also designing a pvc pipe irrigation system for the tomatoes. January is perfect for sitting beside the woodstove and sketching ideas on index cards.

I spent most of January ordering from seed catalogs online and doing research on cover crops and gardening methods. I've also gone ahead and created a four year crop rotation for all of the applicable gardens and mapped it all out on one page in MS Publisher.

For those of you who know how to use MS Publisher, here is the downloadable file on Google Docs: EBG Map

I enjoyed gathering all of the info and organizing it onto one simple sheet of paper. I highly recommend doing this, even if you have one small garden. You can divide a single garden into four squares and still use a four year crop rotation plan.

This is the official state bird of Massachusetts, the Black Capped Chickadee visiting one of my bird feeders earlier this month.

My weather station reports the following facts for this January:

Avg Temp 22.5

High Temp 51.8 (Jan 25th @ 3:10 PM)

Low Temp -3.1 (Jan 30th @ 7:10 AM)

Rain 2.64" (Jan 25th & 26th)

Number of days Temp went above 32 = 15

Number of days Temp went below 32 = 31

Now that January is over, I look forward to my mid-February orchard pruning and forcing some Forcythias in the next blog entry.

:)