Gardening in 2026: the year of being organised

After Christmas and New Year, there is a lull. It’s a handy pause. You can take stock in all aspects of your life. We may become a little more reflective and introspective. Out of this phase comes the resolve to do better. 

This year, whilst the garden is pretty much on pause – not a complete standstill, but things are quiet – I am making a New Year’s revolution. That is not a typo – I did mean revolution. I am not a tidy gardener. I am not organised. I admit it. 

In the other sphere of my working life, I am a food writer. My kitchen is very organised. Everything has its place and it returns there. I can keep a mental inventory of the ingredients I have in stock and it’s fairly accurate. I can even hold two separate kitchen’s worth in my brain when I am staying at my mother’s for an extended period, but I own up to the fact that I am not as good at this level of control in the garden.

Seed organisation

I do not practise stock control with my seeds. In my defence, I did try. I got alphabetical cardboard dividers, upcycled from my youngest daughter’s old school ring binders. I cut them to fit an old wooden wine box. I filed my seeds. 

That was fine for neat commercial packets and the small envelopes of home-collected or traded ones. The bags of seed heads, waiting to be picked over and catalogued quickly submerged the box and the pressure of time in sowing season meant some things were overlooked and lost. 

I am not very good at being ruthless when discarding old seed – I was given packets of 1990s dated seeds and some *grew*! I have a gorgeous red Lychnis Maltese Cross which comes back heroically year after year to remind me of the endurance of viability but I also waste time, space and compost on seeds which are never going to germinate. 

I must resolve to weed out all the old packets and sort the bags. I might just scatter all the seeds on the ground next to the compost heaps and see what happens though – you never know.

I mean to keep a garden diary. I know they are useful, especially when life gets busy. It’s easy to forget certain things like pruning or moving and splitting particular plants that you needed to do before the growing season. It’s helpful to have a place where you can jot down decisions you’ve taken last summer about how a certain colour would be much more effective in a completely different flower bed. 

I have another of my daughter’s school cast-offs (she will be 38 this year, I did say I am not good at throwing things away) – a hardback sketchbook. I stuff plastic labels for shrubs I have added, bulb packet fronts to remind me what’s in the pots and odd magazine cuttings between its pages. I have drawn ideas on the pages but I have failed to look at them again. I think I must be more assiduous about writing things down AND rereading what I have written.

The trouble with tools

These transgressions are not my worst. I am terrible with my tools. I have admitted it. I am forever leaving secateurs and snips, trowels and handforks, and even the big spade and fork, around the garden. I play ‘hunt the trowel’ with alarming frequency and I have lost three pairs of snips. I have searched and searched. 

I have taken to carting all the small hand tools around in an old pool chemical bucket. It works for a bit but I get distracted and somehow I get out of the habit again. I bought special hooks for hanging the big stuff but I didn’t buy enough of them. They’re overfilled and not as useful as they should be. I will buy some more and I must resolve to put things away first even if it starts pouring with rain or I am just popping in for a cup of tea (and find the fire’s been lit and the light is fading and I just don’t go back out).

During the Covid lockdowns the déchetteries (tips) were all closed for a long time. I bagged up my garden waste – couch grass, perennial weeds, brambles, rose prunings etc – in old compost sacks. There were over a hundred lined up on the back terrace when the tips finally reopened. I have since acquired goodness only knows how many more of the things. This year, I shall be making only one way trips with the sacks. Once emptied into the déchets verts (green waste) skip, the bags will be disposed of in the appropriate place.

The other clutter that has grown like mushrooms in the dark is plastic plant pots and trays. I recycle them many times and I have given away a great number – both empty and planted up – and still there are hundreds. I stack them by size. I put the smaller ones in vegetable crates and yet they seem to be everywhere. January gales seem to find and blow them down the garden. 

I used to be able to blame the puppy who would seize them and run around the garden at top speed, evading capture, but she’s a mature five-year-old now and wouldn’t dream of such a thing. It seems such a waste to just throw out serviceable flower pots and I would love to find a nursery which would reuse them.