Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Seedfest

Well, there's no chance this year of a groundhog predicting an early spring. New Jersey is currently sitting under a foot of snow, none of which is melting in the sub-freezing temperatures we've been decidedly not enjoying all week. And apparently, this weather system is just getting warmed up (or more accurately, chilled down). It looks like New Jersey will escape any further snow, but we're being warned to expect wind-chill temperatures down to 12 below as January rolls into February. (Ironically, global warming is almost certainly to blame for this, as increased warming toward the poles is throwing the jet stream out of whack and pushing all this cold air away from the Arctic and into our yards.)

This poses a bit of a problem for our gardening schedule. No matter how cold and snowy it is out there right now, spring will come eventually, and if we want to have any parsley seedlings to plant when it does, this is the week we need to start them. But to do that, we need some garden soil to form the bottom layer in our seed-starting tubes. And right now, our soil isn't particularly easy to get at.

In theory, we could just hold off on this for a couple of weeks, since the parsley seeds we bought in 2023 can be sowed directly in the garden. We did this last year, and they came up just fine. But it made Brian nervous, and he says he'd be more comfortable starting at least a couple of plants indoors. Which is why he just plowed his way out out into the garden and dug through a foot of snow and into the frozen soil to retrieve a sample. It won't be enough for all our seedlings, but it'll do to get the parsley started.

While he was doing this, I was pulling up my garden planner spreadsheet to plot out this year's garden layout. This is a much simpler job than it used to be, as I now just rotate entire beds rather than trying to optimize the placement of each individual crop. However, there are always a few details that need tweaking. Pepper and zucchini plants have to be shifted from one end of the bed to the other to make sure they're not in exactly the same spot two years running. I need to mark the location of last year's winter lettuce so I know not to plant over it until it's all been harvested. (Luckily, this year it's in a spot that will eventually hold a zucchini plant, which won't go in until mid-May.) And a single square of dill, which doesn't need a whole block to itself, has to get squeezed in somewhere. (This year, it'll be bunking with the other zucchini plant.)

So, the beds have been plotted, the dirt has been dug, and the parsley seeds are now soaking, getting ready to go into their tubes tomorrow. And in the meantime, we can settle in for a cozy evening with a pot of hot soup, some fresh-baked biscuits, and the second half of this week's Critical Role. Tucked up on the couch with our blankets and our kitty cats, we'll be snug and safe against the cold of winter, while the soaking seeds on our kitchen counter breathe a promise of spring to come.