Resolve to make no more resolutions next year — just garden

How many of you make New Year’s resolutions?

How many resolutions do you actually keep longer than the time it took to make them?

The urge to do better, to start a new year with good intentions, is deeply ingrained in the human consciousness.

Want to know the most common gardening resolution?

“That’s it! I’m done fighting the heat and the humidity. I’m done battling the weeds and the weather. I’ve had it with the critters! I am not going to have a garden this year!”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the rest of those wayward New Year’s resolutions — this year, I’m going to eat healthy. I’m going to the gym. The determination to not garden will also fall by the wayside like a bowling pin taken out by an expert split-shot from the league champ.

As soon as the dirt warms up and starts smelling right …

… petrichor.

That’s the official name for how dirt smells, especially after a rainfall.

Once the scent of petrichor hits your snoot, all your good intentions and resolutions will be blowin’ in the wind like a poof of dust.

Geosmin, a substance produced by soil bacteria called actinomycetes, along with other microbes, is what creates the scent. Being extremely sensitive to petrichor and able to detect it at very low concentrations is what allows us wild humans to find fresh water and fertile land.

The scent of petrichor also triggers the urge to get out there and play in the dirt. Despite our best intentions, it laughingly short circuits our brains and insists we dig, dig, dig!

Not only that, but the days are slowly getting longer, coaxing and enticing us to spend more time outside.

Our mailboxes are full of seed catalogs, with their drool-worthy descriptions and their state-fair-winning, museum-worthy photos of all the goodies you can grow.

New varieties! Heirloom crops! Bigger! Better! This is the year! You can do it!

Unfortunately, the contents of those catalogs and the actual state of your garden, not to mention the success of your bounty, resemble nothing so much as … the difference between the honeymoon and the marriage.

One’s wearing rose-colored blinders, all full of hope and excitement for new beginnings. The other can be a long slog of hard work, hopefully culminating in something worthwhile.

Gardening kind of fulfills your New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier and get more exercise. If you can get your garden to grow and produce, you can certainly eat healthier — tastier, too. And getting all that produce from A to Z requires a lot of effort. Preparing the ground, planting, hoeing, weeding, picking and toting, cleaning and preserving all require a tremendous amount of energy.

Cussing, too. It takes a lot of lung capacity to adequately berate the turtles hollowing out your cantaloupes. Or the deer mowing down your green beans. Or the rabbits mowing down everything. The squirrels digging up everything you plant almost before you get it planted. The crows noshing on your corn before it even has a chance to sprout. The voles, tunneling down the middle of your rows and eating seeds and small plants. The hornworms decimating your maters. Birds pecking all your strawberries.

None of that takes into account the weeds and insects. There’s a reason the saying “growing like a weed” still resonates. After all your painstaking seed selecting and diligent plant pampering, nothing grows as fast as a weed. One tiny shower of rain and voila, Jack’s beanstalk is racing toward the sky, leaving you puling ’maters and cukes withering in the dust.

And the insects! Planting is all about the honeymoon phase. Planning and implementing and patting yourself on the back ’cause “this is so easy!”

Just about the time you start thinking, “No problem, I got this. I don’t know why anyone thinks this is hard,”the new starts wearing off and the gnats show up. The no-see-ums, aka minuscule velociraptors with jagged needle teeth. Mosquitoes. Yellow flies. Things with no names, like some huge alien creature from Jumanji, all fangs and stingers.

Then, just to add a little more fun to the challenge, the humidity chimes in like a sauna on steroids. This happens usually about the same time the rain disappears like a mirage in the desert and you have to start dragging hoses around — and hopefully remembering to turn them off — before you drown what you were trying to give a drink to.

Along about now is about when the “I’m not doing this next year” part of the equation starts looking better and better. It keeps poking you with all the chutzpah of a pesky little brother in church, reminding you what you said like a toddler on repeat spouting a cuss word in front of your in-laws.

Since you broke your resolution — or maybe it broke you — might as well go ahead and plant a garden. You know you’re going to anyway.

Mid-January is just a tad early, but it’s almost time for potatoes, and cabbage, and onions — any of the cool-weather crops, or cole crops. You might even be still harvesting some of your fall garden.

Go ahead and thumb through those seed catalogs like a kid with the Sears Roebuck, circling everything you want. Go ahead and order or buy those seeds, like the kid who traded his family’s cow for the magic beans. Hopefully you will just grow a regular garden, minus the giant.

Whether you stick to your resolution or not, enjoy the smell of dirt. If you’re strong enough to resist the pull, kudos to you. Whether you garden, or simply go to the farmer’s market and enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labors, you can still delight in the taste of fresh produce. If you can or freeze produce, you’ll extend the time you can savor the veggies.

As you’re working out and doing your breathing exercises, keep repeating to yourself, “I am not going to garden next year!”

Maybe if you repeat it enough times, you’ll actually believe it.