It's not too early to start gardening

I love Christa Carignan's gardening blog. When I look at the ten-day forecast at weather.com and see that I'll be freezing into the foreseeable future, it's nice to go and read about someone actively gardening even in January, thinking about gardening, planning for spring, talking about gardening, living to garden!

Today I see that Christa has published a wonderfully detailed Beginner's Guide to Growing Food in DC, made even better by the fact that it's a blog and people have added helpful comments of their own. Time to start thinking about lettuce and spinach and collecting some seeds to grow in the spring, which I have renewed inspiration to do after watching this video on how to grow basil from seed. I will also try to plant a few more things from Sara Tangren's Chesapeake Native Nursery collection. Last year, I planted spotted mint and foxglove that I bought during Mike Tidwell's Clean Energy Open House, and they both seem to have done well (of course -- they're natives).

Of course, before the planting starts, you can also be working on making the stuff your plants will grow in, as you dream about what you'll be planting in it.