Happy New Year, MGEVs! I hope that you had a healthy holiday season and that you are managing to stay warm. If you are staying inside, checking out all of those tempting catalogs coming your way, you might be making a list of goals for your gardens.

Personally, I have few gardening goals for the year. Probably the biggest, most important New Year’s Gardening Resolution for me is to “keep it simple”!! This is my list:

• Plant the contorted filbert purchased last fall.
• Plant lovely container gardens at home.
• Plant lovely container gardens at the Cowart Building (home of the UGA Horticulture Department here in Griffin).
• Remulch my beds with pine straw.
• Grow enough vegetables for fresh consumption. (At my house, I am responsible for the sugar snap peas, spring and fall broccoli, bush beans, squash, annual herbs, and growing the warm-season vegetable transplants. My husband takes care of the tomatoes, corn, pole beans, pumpkins, and pest control.)
• Install a new fence for the vegetable garden.
• Build a new raised bed for an asparagus patch.
• Locate, purchase, and plant either a Trident maple or a Paperbark maple.

Oncidium ‘Sharry Baby’ smells just like chocolate — no kidding!

And by the way, I am trying my hand at orchids (it’s a competition with my older sister to see whose thumb is greener!). I brought home an orchid from Hawaii last September and have another that has been languishing. They can be extraordinarily beautiful, so I am anxious to make these plants happy!

What are you planning to do this year? Do you have projects for your personal gardens? Does your MGEV project team have goals for a demonstration or community garden? How can UGA Extension support you with those project goals? Let me know by responding in the comment box!