Best Laid Plans

  St Patrick's Day here in Southeastern Massachusetts was  a comfortable fifty degrees and intermittently sunny.  Just after lunch I loaded my wheelbarrow with aged horse manure and rolled it into the fenced back garden. Then I paused and consulted my crib sheet, a barely decipherable list of beds and crops copied from  the lists carefully written out during the winter in my garden notebook. 

  I'm left-handed, and it takes considerable effort for me to write neatly--my mind seems to move too fast for my hand.  I spent a lot of time in January meticulously mapping out the garden on a large sheet of paper, using ruler and pencil, and compiling lists of what to plant where.   Yes, there are computer programs, but I like to keep my garden notes on paper. 

  The lists of plantings for each bed consider several things, from how much sun it receives to the crops planted there in the last three seasons. I try to keep a three year rotation for potatoes and tomatoes-- most other rotations are tricky in beds that grow two or more crops a year.  But somehow  I can't seem to follow my lists. 

  I think it goes back to the basic difference between cooks and bakers-- the first see recipes as guidelines, the second as scientific formulas.  I'm more of a cook in the kitchen, where being impulsive may ruin dinner.  In the garden it can kill the ingredients for a lot of dinners. And so  I stood and looked at my scrawled list on St. Patrick's day and fought back the urge to ignore it.

  By late afternoon I was finished with the year's first plantings, and had done well.  The onions, peas, lettuces and arugula all went in the beds on the list, and they were all labeled.  I saved paint stirrers (ok, I took a few extra at the store) and used these as markers, with the crop and date written on them in sharpie.  I added some radishes on the edges of several beds that were not on the list because I had forgotten them, and I put the spinach in bed eight instead of beets, but I also saved the right three spots for the potatoes that are now pre-sprouting on my bureau. 

  I also did not over-seed! In the past I've planted tiny seeds too thickly, resulting in several rounds of laborious thinning to get good sized lettuces, arugula and spinach.  This time I was patient and meticulous, just like a baker.

  I know the rotation will probably go awry later in the year as weather speeds or slows the crops. That's when my cook's adaptability will help out-- I may plant the butternut squash in a flower bed, or hold potted seedlings a bit longer than planned, and I know I'll be proud of of the creative solutions I come up with, and perhaps make them part of my plans next year.  And I'm going to relax a bit and realize that  sometimes the sweet June peas are worth keeping the tomato plants in pots in the cold frame a week or two longer than planned.