So, I barely survive our first attempt at raising and selling turkeys, getting them all to our customers (who were fabulous, by the way) and cooking a 35 pound turkey for Thanksgiving - not to mention Christmas looming over everything and this happens.  What is "this"?  I'm talking about seed catalogs! 

I haven't had time to digest what happened this last year and now it's time to start planning all over again.  Our garden was expanded this year and we used a modified version of the Mittleider Method where you grow everything vertical when possible. It was extremely effective and I'm dying to get it going even more efficiently this coming year but when am I going to find time to do all my homework? 

This is a lesson I knew but didn't fully understand... this is complicated work and you just may not have the luxury of pondering over the wonder of it all.  You have to stay on top of things, keep reading, learning, experimenting.  There is no stop or start time - it is on-going like any business. 

I am not upset or miserable about all these proddings via mail to get back to planing gardens and a whole new season.  Instead I am startled but excited about it.  It will be fun to see how we do with the garden again.  We thought we had put up a lot of food but realize now how quickly we've gone through it and it's only mid-December!  It's also time to plan for new chicks - meat and layers, time to plan for turkeys and for checking with the butcher to see if he'll take us again.

Someone was telling me about gardening by moon phases.  Really? Huh, well I'm game to learn about that.  I just put a Farmer's Almanac on my Christmas list!