At the setting of the year

I've been reading Alys Fowler's rather lovely list of things she wants to do this year (and rather envying someone who is still young enough to use words like 'moxie' and still be taken seriously).

It inspired me to make my own list: a little shorter but nonetheless one I hope will help me give myself a little direction in the months to come. In the interests of avoiding any mention of the word 'resolutions' - here it is.

1. Crack the secret of getting strawberry jam to set
2. Take my gardening to another level by going back to school again
3. Spend more time just being with my kids
4. Breed my first little bundles of fluff (chickens, in case you're wondering)
5. Acquire some sheep
6. Cook more muffins
7. Finish the never-ending rabbit fencing in the veg garden
8. Grow and eat something I've never tried before
9. Keep at least a few square inches of my desk free of paper
10. Make the time to stop and stare
11. Plant the beginnings of an orchard
12. Find out what disaster they're inflicting on Ambridge on Sunday
13. Join my local choir
14. Finish that book synopsis lurking in my computer for two years now
15. ...and send it off
16. Tackle the scary Kaffe Fassett pattern my husband wants for a sweater
17. Put down more and stronger roots in my adopted county
18. Get back in a boat and start sailing again
19. Harvest some elderberry flowers for making cordial
20. Find a little more space for people as well as plants

Happy New Year everyone and I hope your 2011 is everything you hope it will be.

Happy New Year! and some answers...

Reasons to be cheerful in 2010:

1. It's so bloody cold at the moment we're sure to have a lovely warm spring. (I hope the gardening gods are taking note).

2. I'm going to Borneo in March. (yay!)

3. Against all predictions, the Chelsea Flower Show is looking like it's going to be a corker this year.

4. We're all still here! I wonder what we'll get up to...

Reasons to be a bit apprehensive in 2010:

Say it quietly....

I'm going to be moving house.... probably.

Yeah, I know. Scary. The "probably" is because from where I'm sitting at the moment, the chances of getting someone to agree to buy our slightly dog-eared (and dog-haired) not to mention small-children-soiled semi, and at the same time finding something that's a) ridiculously cheap, b) stunningly beautiful and c) satisfactory not only to me but also to hubby and small people seem vanishingly small. But anyway, I shall be sharing every terrifying twist and turn with you in mind-numbing and gruesomely gory detail through the year, since of course I'm looking not for a house, but for a garden. But don't tell my hubby that.

Now, it has come to my notice that I made the advent calendar just too damn difficult, as I haven't had a single correct answer. So I'm going to go the other way now and make it just pathetically easy by giving you the answers to what's behind the windows. I shall then sit back and wait for the deluge. Once you've unravelled the anagram, send me the name of the prize (three words, two of them a well-known designer, you know the drill) plus the plant genus I'm looking for (one word) and if you're first off the mark you can have a nice late Christmas present from me.

So: with the letters you need highlighted in bold, here are the answers to the 2009 Garden Bloggers' Advent Calendar:

1. Rus in Urbis (http://www.rusinurbis.com/)
2. The Urban Gardener (the-urban-gardener.blogspot.com)
3: Urban Wild Plants (urbanwildplants.blogspot.com/)
4: Spook (of course): the Sock's adorable if mischievous kitten
5: Another pussycat: this time Pushkin from Victoria's Backyard
6: The Inadvertent Gardener (http://www.theinadvertentgardener.com/)
7: The Artists Garden (www.artistsgarden.co.uk/)
8: One of the many Chilean guavas to turn up at Mark Diacono's rather gorgeous Otter Farm (http://www.otterfarm.co.uk/)
9: Look closely and you'll see VP of Veg Plotting fame
10: Ryan's Garden (ryans-garden.blogspot.com)
11: A Digestive biscuit: its merits as the perfect dunker are discussed at length during Encounters with Remarkable Biscuits.
12: The Fat Rascal, one of this year's prizewinners at the Emsworth Village Show (emsworthvillage2009.blogspot.com)
13: I wanted the name of the blogger for this one: it was of course the inimitable Arabella Sock (sea-of-immeasurable-gravy.blogspot.com).
14: This competition taught me that garden bloggers have a lot of cats, but also a lot of amphibians: this one is Nina the Lizard from Plants are the Strangest People. I appear to be the only garden blogger to admit to having a dog.
15: In the Toad's Garden (toads.wordpress.com)
16: The Garden Monkey (thegardenmonkey.blogspot.com)
17: Ros Badger (http://www.rosbadger.blogspot.com/)
18: The Mini-White Cucumber, star of many an unaccountably violent film at Cleve West's blog Tilth and Tillage
19: The Inelegant Gardener (inelegantgardener.blogspot.com)
20: Tricky, this one: it's the Nasturtium from Esther's original blog Esther in the Garden.
21: The greenhouse is called Wendy, she lives at Silvertreedaze, but she is of course owned by the wonderful Nigel Colborn.
22: The Patient Gardener (patientgardener.wordpress.com)
23: The multi-award-winning Blogging at Blackpitts (web.me.com/blackpittsgarden/Site_2/Blog/Blog.html
24: The delectable but not altogether horticultural Sabrina Duncan International, star of this year's Malvern Spring Show and the first woman/man ever to deprive James Alexander Sinclair of the power of speech. Appeared first on the Sea of Immeasurable Gravy, I believe.

That really is it now. If you could email your answers to sally[dot]nex[at]btinternet[dot]com I can get rid of the parcel currently cluttering up my desk. And if you don't do so by next weekend (Jan 7-8) I shall donate it to the Constant Collection of Horticultural Yummy Things.

Happy New Year everyone!

STOP PRESS: We have a winner!

VP, who must have been sitting poised and waiting over a hot keyboard as I typed the above this morning, was first off the block with the correct answers.

They are: Dan Pearson, Spirit - his new book, which was the prize and will be winging its way over to Chippenham shortly. The plant genus was Viburnum.

Well done VP! And commiserations to anyone else who also sent in their answers or was on the point of doing so. You'll have another chance next year if I can muster the energy to do it again - with a bit of luck and some technical advice, it will hopefully be a bit better, too!

Indoor gardening

Frost has stopped play. The pond hasn't defrosted for a week, and part of the lawn is permanently white. As for the allotment... we had to go and buy some parsnips the other day as the ones I've grown so lovingly are now concreted in to a rock-hard veg bed (yeah, I know, should have lifted them and heeled them in somewhere sandier, didn't get around to it).

The BBC's rather awe-inspiring monthly weather forecast says this will carry on for the rest of January, as it's caused by a wodge of high pressure that's apparently "notoriously difficult to budge". Oh help. I'll be reduced to making curtains soon.

Anyway, I'm trying to comfort myself with the thought of millions of tiny slugs freezing solid, and meanwhile doing some indoor gardening. This is long overdue: I'm very late in planning my seed order, which I must send off this week as otherwise the spuds won't be chitting in time. I've also, at last, come up with a coherent design for the front garden, and I'll be measuring up those bits of the back garden I'm not already digging up shortly - all part of the Great Garden Makeover of course. The only trouble with plans is, you then have to put them into some sort of action... which in my case almost always means half-finished projects all over the garden as the summer rush takes over yet again.

I've also been making some New Year's Resolutions to ring in 2009. A bit of a pointless exercise, of course, but I like to see how quickly I jettison them each year. This year, they are more informed at least thanks to all this blogging (mine but more frequently other people's).

• I'm going to start a diary (I do this every year. Never got past March yet. At least I know what I was doing in early spring back to about 1975).
• While I'm taking those photos for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day each month, I'm also going to photograph the whole of my garden, warts and all, as a record of all these improvements I'm making (this of course will be strictly not for publication: all photography found on this blog is a triumph of the macro lens over reality).
• I'm going to start some of those projects I'm planning (see above)
• I'm going to finish some of those projects I'm planning (see above)
• I shall try not to get impatient when my eight-year-old wants to plant tulips in my potato beds, but shall let her with a beneficent smile in the interests of keeping her gardening (and will secretly replant the tulips back in the same spot after harvesting the potatoes).
• My reading of other people's blogs shall not take over my working life
• ... and nor will surreptitious trips to the allotment when I should be at my desk
• I shall cram in as much knowledge as I can about gardening, plants and plantspeople, and hopefully end the year a better gardener.

Right, that'll do for now. I wish everyone who drops by this blog from time to time all the very best for 2009. Happy New Year!