The gardening resolutions you make this year can help you, your garden, and your community grow.
Like a canvas of untouched snow, the new year opens before us. The sunlight is starting to return, and our local Illinois plants are eagerly awaiting a season of new blossoms and growth, which means it’s time for us to also start preparing for a new beginning with these 2024 New Year’s resolutions for gardeners!
Resolution 1: Grow Your Garden to Its Fullest
Now is the perfect time to take stock of those empty spaces in your garden and help them realize their full potential. Take advantage of shade-loving species, wet-or dry-loving plants, hardy native species, and a diverse array of vegetables, wildflowers, and local trees. Resolve to grow your garden to the fullest this year—blossoms, berries, vegetables, fruit, leaves, and more!
Resolution 2: Invite Birds, Bees, and Butterflies to Your Garden
Let your garden be a haven for pollinators and other beneficial insects in 2024. Choose a diversity of flowering plants, especially species native to the Chicago area, to provide these winged wonders with a continuous supply of nectar throughout the year. When you create a pollinator paradise, you ensure the health and vitality of your garden and our entire local ecosystem.
Resolution 3: Prioritize Your Garden’s Health and Resilience
This New Year’s, resolve to build a healthy foundation for your garden by adding compost, applying compost tea, mulching, cover cropping, testing for deficiencies, and adding amendments as needed. Also, take advantage of water-wise practices such as rain barrels and drip irrigation to conserve this precious resource without sacrificing your garden’s beauty. Prune proactively to ensure its abundance, beauty, and longevity. A new growing season is also the perfect time to take measures to make your garden more resilient against extreme weather.
Resolution 4: Master a New Gardening Skill
We’re currently in the midst of a botanical revival, with breakthroughs in soil science, permaculture, ecological gardening, heirloom plant revivals, and more happening on a near-constant basis. Take advantage of this influx of knowledge by resolving to learn one new gardening skill in 2024. Do this by attending a gardening workshop, joining a gardening club, exchanging knowledge with neighbors, learning from local experts, or just spending a bit of time on Google!
Resolution 5: Year-Round Bounty: Plan for a Continuous Harvest
The dream of a year-round harvest is closer than you may think with strategic planning. Aim to embrace the art of succession planting, choose seasonal varieties thoughtfully, grow a wide range of crops, and experiment with indoor gardening to extend your 2024 growing season and enjoy homegrown vegetables all year long!
Resolution 6: Share Your Garden’s Abundance
As gardeners, we’re constantly bearing witness to the earth’s natural abundance; our apple tree provides us with more fruit than we can ever possibly harvest, and with a single successful spinach harvest, we suddenly have more salads than we can eat! This year, make a resolution to share these gifts with your local community. When we make giving part of our gardening, we align ourselves with the natural generosity of the earth!
Resolution 7: Get to Know Your Local Bioregion
By exploring more of our local bioregion, we uncover a forgotten piece of our identity and open our eyes to the unique life that grows here. It’s easiest to do this by exploring nearby wild parks, after which we can take these discoveries home to our gardens, where we can align our gardening practices with the local climate, foster local biodiversity, and enjoy the friendship of the many native plants, birds, and insects who also call Chicagoland home.
Resolution 8: Cultivate Connection by Joining a Gardening Community
Gardening is not a solely solitary pursuit; it’s a communal celebration of growth and shared passion. In the coming year, make a resolution to cultivate connections within your local gardening community. Join a gardening club, attend workshops and events, or simply visit your neighbors’ gardens to exchange ideas, share experiences, and draw inspiration from fellow green thumbs in your community. By nurturing a sense of community, you expand your knowledge, find encouragement from like-minded people, and share in the joy of cultivating life from the soil.
Resolution 9: Get to Know Your Existing Plants Better
Your garden’s existing trees and shrubs are sometimes like old friends you haven’t contacted in a while, waiting patiently in the background with their gifts of fresh air, flowers, and berries. This New Year, it’s time to keep up our part of the relationship and pay our old friends more attention. Even if it’s a stalwart oak that requires very little from us, spend some time with your tree, get to know its likes and dislikes, and watch your relationship blossom in new ways!
Resolution 10: Grow Plants that You Love
The plant world is too vast, and Illinois’ growing season is too short to waste time, space, and resources on plants you don’t absolutely adore, so this year, resolve to dedicate whatever garden space you have to an assortment of your favorite species and varieties, whether they be vegetables, berry bushes, garden perennials, or native wildflowers.
Resolution 11: Get the Kids Involved
Few activities are as enriching for kids as gardening. Just think about it—where else can you play in the dirt, see a seed grow into a sunflower, frolic among butterflies, and binge on fresh raspberries? Your garden can quickly become your kids’ paradise, connecting them with the natural world and teaching them lifelong skills. Get them, their friends, and even the neighbor kids involved and excited about the wonders of the natural world!
Resolution 12: Thin the Carrots
Successful gardening is often about details. Even lifelong gardeners sometimes forget to do simple tasks that make a garden grow—like thinning the carrots. This year, take a vow to stay on top of your garden’s tiniest details and promise yourself that you’ll take care of all those small tasks that have a big impact on your garden!
The gardening resolutions you make this year can help you, your garden, and your community grow. Each new skill, friend, and piece of knowledge you gain helps you create abundance for yourself and your community. For more expert advice and inspiration for creating your own gardening New Year resolutions, visit our garden centers in Bloomingdale and Carpentersville, and keep up to date with our regular blogs! Let’s make 2024 a year to blossom!
Platt Hill Nursery is Chicago’s premier garden center and nursery.
