Now that the hustle and bustle of the holidays is behind us, it’s time for much needed rest and relaxation this January.

The rose catalogs should be coming soon and there will be plenty of food for thought in them. January is also the time for reflection on the year past and for making plans for the coming gardening season. It’s time to plan to make this year better than last.

Do you know all your roses by name? Maybe it’s time to get some good garden markers—ones that won’t fade out before the end of the season. There are many types on the market.

How about a garden plot plan? If you’re really ambitious, you can put all your information on a spreadsheet. These are just a few ideas to mull over in front of a warm fire on a cold winter’s night.

Rose Kones and Evergreen Boughs

As for me, I start the year in the garden on New Year’s Day. I have an extremely cold and windy garden, so I use Rose Kones for winter protection.

I put the Kones on the roses on Thanksgiving weekend, but I left the removable tops off since we get fairly variable temperatures during the early part of winter. Now that it is steadily cold I can close up the roses completely until early spring. This also gives me a chance to see how the roses are doing. Being outside on a cold, clear New Year’s Day really clears the head and is quite exhilarating.

For those of you who hill up your roses with soil or compost, now is a good time to cover the mounds with evergreen boughs. This will help keep the mounds in place if you get winter rains. A good source of these boughs is discarded Christmas trees. Just cut the boughs and place them on the mounds. If you have a snow cover, place them on the snow. It should help keep the ground cold.

The Organized Gardener

January is also the time for making resolutions, and this year I resolve to be more organized. Seems I resolve to do that each year.

My project for January is a start on organization. I am going to make a map of my rose garden. I started it this summer by roughly drawing it on a scrap of paper and writing down the names of the roses.

Now I’ll draw it more neatly (and bigger). I’ll mark the place of each rose with a circle about the size of a dime. In each circle, I’ll put a number that will be the key to all of that rose’s information.

By using a spreadsheet, I can record variety names, classes, color, and virtually any bit of information that I want to recall later. This should help me track how well (or how poorly) my roses are doing. This will be very useful next winter at ordering time, and when memory tends to fade.