Try to Remember what Grew in September
As a new, and then a not-so-new gardener, I remember mumbling every spring about how nice it would be if someone would publish a beautiful picture book of what plants look like when only the first two leaves have emerged from the ground. In Spring it seems like there are thousands - even millions of mysterious leaf pairs sprouting everywhere. And so I also felt that this book should be mandatory reading for any would-be gardener.
If such a book had been available, I might not have spent one spring industriously uprooting all the poppies I had planted the fall before. Thousands of them. The only thing I had ever seen grow in such quantities before then was crabgrass, so I figured those little green things had to be weeds!
This was the result of a lesson that I thought I had learned the previous year when I carefully and industriously watered and fed what turned out to be bumper crop of crabgrass before I realized that all plants, even tiny ones, do not look alike, and that therefore, something was wrong.
Eventually, (fortunately!), a gardener learns to recognize many returning friends as well as repeating menaces, and makes fewer mistakes with the old familiar faces. It's only the newcomers we may have trouble recognizing. It might not be a bad idea to make your own photo record of baby plants, so that you don't pull up something that you treasure, and can be absolutely positive you are routing an enemy before it gathers full strength.
Another lesson that comes hard is calculating how much of that space in the garden is really empty and how much will be completely overcrowded when the dormant plants emerge. This is a good thing to know when it's time for the gardener's much-anticipated annual event - the walks around the garden with a box full of new plants trying to decide where (and if) they will fit. IF is not usually a problem with a new garden. It's not really a problem with an old one either. In the former case, there's usually more than enough room. In the latter, there isn't a millimetre of bare space to be found.
In that circumstance, you have to MAKE room. That means figuring out what all the emerging green and purplish and white shoots are, and which ones you don't much care about. It would be nice if you could say "Oh, I hate that washed out pink columbine so I'll pull it and replace it with this creeping thyme. And you can most certainly SAY it - but you wouldn't want to do it considering that the columbine was 18" tall and the creeping thyme about 1/16th of an inch. So you have to decide what you have in the appropriate size that can go to make room for the new things. Which is why it's a good idea to take notes on about how big each plant gets when you are keeping your garden journal. (You ARE, of course, keeping a garden journal? You won't be sorry!)
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