Make This Your Year In The Garden: New Year Resolution Ideas To Enhance Your Gardening

The new year is a wonderful opportunity to turn a page on former gardening exploits, learn from past mistakes – and look forward to many months of exciting growing potential ahead. Whether you’re tending to large beds and borders, dabbling in some ambitious landscaping schemes, or just cultivating a few charming containers, a little planning and preparation can go a long way as the door opens on another gardening calendar year.

It’s not always easy making New Year resolution ideas stick. Gazing out at sleepy, weather-worn gardening spaces, getting motivated might feel a challenge – but this is your best time to get the jump on all those exciting sunny days of planting, growing, harvesting and wildlife watching. Let this guide to key New Year’s resolution suggestions and gifts for gardeners inspire you to channel your good intentions early (and productively), so you can enjoy the results earlier… and for as long as possible.

Ideas And Gifts For New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

A few New Year resolutions (like those that involve cutting back on chocolate) are doomed to fail. But others are not only easy and attainable, but increasingly important for anyone keen to adapt sustainable and eco-friendly gardening practices. The suggestions outlined here will help develop confidence and skills and enrich your growing experiences for years to come. From simple New Year gardening resolutions like shrub selections to important ideas like pruning and composting, this guide can help you start your year as you mean to go on.

1. Think Thematically with Grow-Your-Own

The best passion projects thrive on focus. It can be overwhelming to contemplate all the different things we’d like to achieve in our gardens in the year ahead. Drilling down to a specific growing idea gives ballast and precision to some of the bigger questions we might face. So if you’re feeling a bit daunted by all the options, zone in on one or two key ideas.

If it’s edibles you’re keen to cultivate this year, start with a simple herb garden. You can pick up easy herb-starting kits, such as Coco & Seed’s Mason Jar Herb Garden Kit, for a simple, self-contained herb-growing experience that removes the guesswork and offers full transparency (pun intended). Other great themes to kickstart your calendar year include vertical gardens, native borders or cutting gardens. These ideas can start small and then be as elaborate as you have the time or inclination for.

You can even focus on a color (or color combination) that can serve as the foundation for ornamentals and perennials. For instance, you could plot out a flower bed planted with drifts of low-maintenance cosmos in tonal medleys of pinks and whites, such as the Park Seed Sonata cosmos mix, available in the Gardening Know How Shop. These New Year’s resolution gift ideas can act as the basis for accompanying ornamental plantings of dianthus, hydrangeas, asters, zinnias, astilbes, dahlias and phlox.

2. Get to Grips with Pruning

Most gardeners cite pruning as one of the key areas where mistakes can be made. Having to correct pruning mistakes – especially winter pruning mistakes – can be timely and tedious, so start this year as you mean to go on and commit to doubling your efforts with critical cuts: by learning how to prune at the right times and in the best ways, and by using the right tools for the job.

Whether your primary goal is to maintain shrub health, remove dead or decaying branches, or shape young plants in the best way for vitality and longevity, your choice of blades can literally make or break your gardening ambitions. Make sure you adapt your cutting tools for the task at hand. Depending on the size and softness of plant stems, and how often you make those cuts, you will find that a reliable pair of compact pruning shears is one of the best investments you can make in the new year.

Cutters like the Womanswork Garden Shears, available as part of an exclusive Gardening Know How Shop bundle, are ideal for smaller hands and efficient, timely trims. This bundle also includes plant snips as well as gloves for safe and happy cutting. For thicker branch work, you can use loppers or a saw. Alternatively, try a serrated hori hori knife for precision cuts at speed. As well as being an excellent pruning tool, the Vego Garden 10-in-1 Hori Hori Knife Kit can also be used as a garden go-to for quick weeding and harvesting cuts.

3. Be Courageous With Compost

If you haven’t yet felt brave enough (or patient enough) to create your own compost, make this your year for a genuine gardening revolution! Being able to compost at home and turn kitchen scraps and organic domestic waste to good use is a natural win-win that will fuel ornamentals and edible plants year after year. Sustainability should be close to the top of every new year’s resolution list for future gardening projects – reducing the need for landfills and chemicals, and promoting self-sufficiency, all while making our backyards bountiful.

For beginners who might feel trepidation about the best organic techniques and correct materials, a dedicated composting unit can take the sting out and free up time for you to focus on the things you want to grow. Traditionally, composting might have felt like it would take years to come to fruition, but a unit like the Reencle Home Composter, available in the Gardening Know How Shop, accelerates the process in a smooth and fuss-free (and odor-free) manner. Its break-through filter system creates real compost far quicker than many other systems and ultimately saves money in running costs.

Or, if you fancy getting your garden worms to help you out with future composting options, you can just slide the Vego In-Ground Worm Composter into the ground along with some garden scraps and a couple of wiggly garden friends. This composting solution, which works like a backyard food processor, is an easy and reliable way of guaranteeing happier plants from the ground up. It’s also compact, so it’s perfect for patio and balcony garden projects.

4. Plant a Tree or a Shrub

Every gardener will have a different set of preferred plants jostling for position. But allowing for taste (and space), part of any new year’s resolutions for gardeners should be to plant a tree or a shrub. From feathery evergreens to fruity edibles, several trees and shrubs in our Gardening Know How Shop can quickly establish in a broad range of hardiness zones and growing conditions and, once planted, require relatively little ongoing care beyond watering and feeding.

As a preliminary choice for beginners, try a tough but highly attractive juniper cultivar such as Blue Star or Gold Cone, both available from the Gardening Know How Shop. As well as being slow growing and low maintenance, these bushy perennials are compact so work well as container options for those who are short on space. Plant junipers between October and March, so they have time to adapt before the gardening season begins in earnest.

For an edible shrub option to suit small spaces, try blueberries such as Bluecrop or Duke from Green Promise Farms, both prolific and highly colorful fruiting options. Other smart berrying shrub options include lush, pinky-purple fruiting Winterthur viburnum. This shrub is ideal for attracting bird varieties like cardinals, bluebirds, thrushes, waxwings and northern mockingbirds to your yard. Which brings us to the last resolution to remember this year…

5. Support Wildlife and Pollinators

One crucial gardening ambition to factor in this year is to support your local pollinators and wildlife. Acting on this intention even in small ways with well-selected wildlife lover gifts and gardening choices can transform your yard into a safe and trusted sanctuary for birds and other winged visitors.

Along with carefully positioned bird baths and native flowering plants, give some thought to feeders. You’ll need clean, easily accessible and safe feeders for common garden birds. It’s also well worth investing in a dedicated hummingbird feeder to bring the more nimble agents to your yard. The Sugar Shack Hanging Hummingbird Feeder from Wayside Gardens creates a unique floral form, repurposed from old cans, creating a striking focal point and highly alluring to hummingbirds.

A few thoughtfully chosen shrubs can also boost your garden’s birdie appeal, and needn’t take up too much space if you think vertically. A plant like the Major Wheeler honeysuckle from Green Promise Farms offers a dual benefit. It raises your bird-friendly profile to the likes of purple finches, robins and hermit thrushes, and it also creates an easy visual dynamic that will readily clamber up fences, gates or trellises with dazzling florals and yummy scents.

Attracting bees and butterflies is also a worthy enterprise. One easy way to boost pollinator appeal is with bee cups. The Bee Cups range, including Pastel Bee Cups and Bees Knees watering stations, can create a safe and happy landing place. And don’t forget to plant some native flowers: just a few Milkweed Heirloom seeds, available from the Gardening Know How Shop, can make a big difference to your local ecosystem, and visiting Monarch butterflies will thank you for growing this darling perennial.

Other Inspirational New Year Ideas from GKH

Make some room for a few of these other New Year resolution gifts and gardening suggestions. Oh, and just in case you haven’t already, don’t forget to grab a fresh garden journal so you can record your plans, monthly progress reports, successes and failures… It’s all important stuff to keep somewhere safe, both for your own future planting and for the benefit of your wider community. Let’s help each other!

• Inspire evergreen and ornamental flower lovers with these winter plants for seasonal interest to brighten the quieter months of the year.
• Tempt indoor gardeners to cultivate more gorgeous green plants with houseplant gift ideas for any space at any time of year.
• Grab a headstart on the gardening calendar year with some of these curated seed starting gift ideas for flowers and edibles.
• Browse more gifting ideas in the GKH Shop's Garden Gifts section.

This article features products available from third party vendors on the Gardening Know How Shop.