Plan Your Work. Work Your Plan.

Are you all ready to jump in on the tasks at hand? If we are discussing your garden are you ready to get dirty? What about your life are you ready to go all in? Hold on a minute! What's your plan? Planning saves you time, energy, effort, and money. I might also mention frustration and possibly reduce the amount of mistakes you make once you begin.

For example, let's say you are ready to plant flowers, you've performed your research (spoke to someone at a plant nursery, Home Depot, or read a book on gardening, Internet, etc.) and analyzed what plant life will work well in your garden. So why not just get started and go buy them? Well, before you buy your flowers or shrubbery or both, you need to visualize how you will arrange the plant life. Will you plant what my dad likes to call "foundation plants." He says these plants are hearty and live all year round and provide the foundation for your garden. Plants like Rhododendrons, Azaleas, etc. I won't go through the variety of shrubs you can chose from but you get the point. How will you place them? Do you need to buy any tools to plant them? What about chemicals to help them grow (like Miracle Gro or Miracle Gro for Acid loving plants)? How much time will you allocate to landscape this area? The point is you want to have a plan for what plant life you will buy, how you plan to landscape them, a start and end date for the effort, and any tools you may also need to purchase so you can have them on hand when you are ready to begin, and a budget.

In life you also need a plan. For example, let's say you want to learn a new language. It's a good idea to research the available language instruction material (CD, DVD, Book, software or online material) or even classes. Decide how much time you will allocate to learning the new language and possibly find someone to practice with. Then set a goal for learning the basic words and phrases of the language so you can communicate effectively.

In gardening as in life if you fail to plan then plan to fail. The next topic we will discuss is executing the plan, or more specifically, doing the work.