It’s a new day, it’s a new year
I hear Michael Buble singing, “Birds flying high, you know how I feel, sun in the sky, you know how I feel, breeze drifting by, you know how I feel, it’s a new dawn, a new day, a new life for me feeling good.”
Time for New Year’s resolutions or starting a bucket list, or both. Best intentions are summoned up and itemized. Life goes on and I usually stick to my same ol’ tried and true behavior, nothing changes.
Hope yours was a Happy New Year.
This year is different, it is a Leap Year where every four years we try to align our Gregorian calendar with the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Every four years we have a spare day. This year we have 366 days to live it up. One more day is added to February. Should I welcome it with indifference or accept it as a challenge. Should I consider what are lucky foods to start a new year. Be sure your cupboards are full to start the New Year.
One resolution I need to remember is to change the year when I write the date. No need to live in the past.
Eating 12 grapes at midnight, one for each month of the new year, is lucky. Round foods resemble coins or money, so that is good luck. Eating black-eyed peas for the New Year brings good luck, and if you wanted to be able to pick black-eyed peas now, for they are ripe now, you need to start 80 to 100 days before wanting a mature dried pea, after 70 days they can be harvested as a snap bean. Since you need the dried peas, Vigna unguiculate, now, 100 days ago would be to plant them at least in late September.
Harvest them when the pods are three to four inches long and you see the swelling of the bean inside the pod. Be careful pulling them because you might pull the vine also. They come as bush or pole beans, with vining plants growing in excess of six feet, while the bush varieties get two to three feet tall and spread another two feet.
We don’t have to wait for frosts generally, we are fortunate to live in the South, because cowpeas don’t grow well with the cold. Our temperatures stay warm most of the time, but cowpeas are heat lovers. A well-watered plant in organic, slightly acidic soil produces best, but don’t get the leaves wet as they are likely to fall victim to fungus diseases.
Black-eyed peas have been growing in the U.S. South since colonial times. As a legume, they fix the nitrogen in their roots, leaving it in the soil for the following vegetable planted there. Do not plant cowpeas where other legumes have grown in the last three years. They grow well with cucumbers and strawberries, but not with onions or garlic. Actually, they’re closer to a bean than a pea. Called cowpeas, they are annuals that go to seed in one season.
Another German “good luck” meal for the new year is pork and sauerkraut. I hope your New Year was all you wanted. I sat at my TV and watched the ball drop and ate my pomegranate for good luck.
Neighbors set off fireworks starting at 10:15 pm, so I had plenty of time to be awake and plan my good luck.
It is time for herbs to thrive. This cooler weather helps them flourish. A small kitchen garden helps with seasoning our cooking, or windowsill pots like I do. Putting them in the kitchen window above the sink helps remind me to water, a task I forget to do when they are outside.
Pruning spring non-flowering shrubs and trees to improve their form can be done now.
Florida’s Arbor Day is coming up, the third Friday in January, Jan. 17. It started in 1886. One of the first states to do so in the U.S. Over 200 communities in Florida celebrate it now. Celebrate by preparing to plant a tree. National Arbor Day is always the last Friday in April, making April 24 National Arbor Day. We just do our own thing, over 200 communities in Florida do so.
Well, it is now 2020, a new decade to embrace. With this cooler warm weather, we are enjoying being able to get out and about; gardening is still not easy, but just not such a chore. The grass still needs mowing, or at least the seed-heads, it’s reproducing, filling in any empty spaces when mowed.
The circle of life continues. Start a bucket list for your future ambitions. Behold! The future awaits.
I hope you all have a happy and prosperous New Year, a new decade full of abundance and joy.
Joyce Comingore is a Master Gardener, hibiscus enthusiast and member of the Garden Club of Cape Coral.