Happy New Year from the Gardening Grannies - WMDT 47 News - Delmarva's Choice

Happy New Year from the Gardening Grannies

Salisbury, MD. After a year-long absence from blogging, the Gardening Grannies celebrated our return to garden blogging at our annual New Year's Day Retreat at Granny Griffith's home just south of Salisbury. Our blogging goal is to provide information and gardening news in a fun and timely manner which we hope you will enjoy and share with your friends.

Fortified with our favorite adult beverages and pot luck delicacies (gardeners make the best cooks, you know), we Grannies began our winter review of newly arrived seed catalogs on New Year's Day. Swapping theories on planting, how to most effectively deal with marauding critters ranging from deer to stink bugs, sketching out planting plans, sharing seeds leftover from last summer and deciding who would start how many transplants and for whom, the conversation had a decidedly lively tone. Granny Griffith, who may have been into the cooking sherry before her guests arrived, had some "unique" ideas on how to deal with certain particularly troublesome garden critters. Not being sure if some of the ideas were exactly legal, we'll check them out before sharing them with you!

At our Retreat, we came up with a variety of New Year's Resolutions for 2013, a half dozen of which we can even share:

• Keep the creative gardening juices flowing by visiting at least one public garden or new garden center every month
• Have regular brainstorming sessions to develop and test new theories
• Find at least one child to introduce to gardening
• Plant what we can't normally purchase locally
• Don't fight Mother Nature and learn to live with a few weeds here and there
• Plan for ease of maintenance

Those are ours; we hope you will share your gardening resolutions back with us.

As in every other year for the last fifteen years, the Gardening Grannies found some tempting new entries in that landslide of 2013 catalogs.…

• Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog (www.rareseeds.com ) is offering, for the first time, "Vernissage Tomatoes" developed by Ukrainian plant enthusiast and breeder, Ruslan Dukhov. The Grannies have ordered green, black, pink and yellow, looking forward to a spectacular nutritional rainbow of the two ounce fruits. Thai pumpkins and French Breakfast radishes are two other tempting offerings in this coffee table quality, two hundred page plus catalog.
• Vermont Bean Seed Company (www.vermontbean.com ) for a wide selection of bean and other seeds and plants. Consider planting for color with your selections of beans, beets and other veggies.
• Totally Tomatoes (www.totallytomato.com ) built their reputation on this veggie and offer an amazing selection along with a range of other seeds and growing choices.
• The Cook's Garden (www.cooksgarden.com ) offers an array of organic heirloom seeds and plants plus some kitchen essentials such as their "flower power cutter", a petal-shaped cutter for shaping fruits and crudités and sure to entice even the pickiest eater

If you didn't receive many catalogs yet this season, don't despair. On Thursday, I'll post a list of links to catalogs we think you might enjoy.

Gardening Grannies, a group of avid and Master Gardeners, live, love and garden on the Delmarva Peninsula. You can reach us at gardeninggrannies@wmdt.com and we look forward to hearing from you.