I’ve been away from the house for about a month, and in that time wrote a short book about my 2020 in gardening. It’s called A Pandemic Gardening Journal, and it’s available now on Amazon.

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It’s the middle of winter, which means I can’t do much work on my garden directly.

There’s tons going on in the garden — flowers in their dormancy phase, bulbs waiting for the ground to warm up in Spring — but that means I have to take a back seat to nature and let things play out.

What I can do is plan for the year ahead. Over the past two months I’ve received a small mountain of seed catalogs from various retailers, and now is the time I sit down and figure out what I want to purchase for the garden. I’m always astounded to see what new colors and shapes of plants there are. Even more exciting is when I see a plant that almost made the cut the year prior but I couldn’t figure out how to use in the garden. With sticky notes and highlighters in hand and a pot of coffee at my side, I begin the selection process like millions of other gardeners.

After I’ve got my list, I like to transcribe all of the plants I’m interested in to a spreadsheet. This helps me get an understanding of what varieties, colors, or themes I’m going after. If I’ve circled a plant in four catalogs, I’m probably buying one, and the game then becomes finding the best one.

“Best” is a difficult word in gardening. Some times best means, “easy growing,” other times it’s, “peculiar sized,” or simply, “cool colors.” It’s important to recognize that best is in the eye of the beholder, and accept that. Every garden is different, every season is different. When growing from seed so much can go awry that if you don’t succeed it’s easy to think the failure came from that winter day when you purchased the seeds.

Doom from the start is possible. Seed packets can come with all duds, that’s usually why there are so many seeds per packet. This adds an element of difficulty for an urban gardener like me: in a pack of 200 sunflower seeds I can estimate that 40 will be duds, but I can only plant 20 total sunflowers in my plot so what do I do?

My solution is to not sweat the numbers themselves, but let averages do the work for you. I try not to dedicate too much of my garden to long growing season plants, and instead focus on things that stick around for 1-2 months, or natives. When I know I’ve planned to have a spot of bare earth in 2 months, things aren’t as stressful when I’m googling, “how long does it take for plant to sprout?” Similarly native plants are by definition optimized for growing in my yard, so I simply revel in how happy the native insects and birds must be to see a friendly face.