The new year is here, and its arrival will inspire many of us to make personal resolutions — an age-old custom intended to improve our lives throughout the coming year.

But we gardeners sometimes find our resolutions hard to follow. What starts as a good intention, too often turns into a “just get it done” attitude by planting time.

Sticking to resolutions, however, can actually save time, energy, money and frustration.

The National Gardening Association estimates that 19 percent more people grew vegetables in 2009 than in 2008. While experienced gardeners may adhere easily to their annual gardening resolutions, new gardeners will see real results by following through on the following suggestions.

If this list seems a little daunting, try picking just one or two resolutions for this year. Once you’ve appreciated the results and these gardening tasks have become habit, it will be easier to add a few more resolutions to your annual list.

Have a plan

I know. It’s easy to head out on a sunny spring day, buy a bunch of seeds and transplants, and pop them in the garden. But having a garden plan in mind before you plant will help you grow more, grow better and save time and money. Good planning helps you to arrange your beds and plant the right number of each vegetable to maximize your space.

Build the soil

If your vegetable garden looked a little anemic

last summer and the plants didn’t grow as well as you hoped, improve your soil. Start with a soil test. In early spring, add organic fertilizers, lime, sulfur and compost as indicated by the test results. Adding these amendments early allows them to break down before the plants really start to grow.

Use raised beds

Unless your soil is sandy, gardening in raised beds leads to better plant growth. Raised beds warm up faster and dry out more quickly in spring, and they also use less space. You can build permanent beds from rot-resistant wood, cinder blocks, bricks, or stone, or mound the garden soil into temporary beds that you reshape each spring. In a raised bed, you can concentrate your weeding, watering, and fertilizing efforts, which leads to a more productive garden.

Grow in containers

If you only have a small deck or balcony, you can grow vegetables in containers. Self-watering containers are productive and easy to use. Even if you have space to grow vegetables in garden soil, containers are a great solution for raising specialty crops that may not do well in cool soils, such as eggplant.

Mulch, mulch, mulch

Did I say you should mulch? Organic mulches, such as hay, straw, chopped leaves and untreated grass clippings, suppress weed growth, conserve soil moisture and add nutrients to the soil. Wait until your seedlings are up and growing well, then place a 2- to 3-inch-thick layer of organic mulch around them. In cold climates, preheat the soil with plastic mulches to give your garden a jump on the growing season.

Visit regularly

The best sign of a healthy garden is the gardener’s footprint. A garden that’s visited every day, even for just 5 to 10 minutes, means the plants are well tended and any problems are noticed quickly and dealt with. Make it a habit to visit the garden right after work, first thing in the morning or at lunchtime to pull errant weeds, pick mature vegetables, water thirsty plants and scout for pests.

Pick early and often

For many fruiting vegetables — tomatoes, peppers, beans, summer squash and cucumbers — the more often you pick, the more the plants will produce. (And small summer squashes and cucumbers also taste delicious.) So even if your refrigerator is full of cucumbers, keep picking. You can always give extra produce away to a neighbor or donate it to a local food bank.

Keep planting

Once a crop is finished, don’t just leave the ground fallow. Instead, plant something else. Succession planting allows you to keep the vegetables coming right into fall. For example, plan to follow a crop of bush beans with lettuce. When spinach plants go to seed, sow another bed of carrots. If a squash plant dies from disease or insects, yank it out and sow some greens.

Charlie Nardozzi is National Gardening Association’s senior horticulturist and editor. Find more gardening tips at www.garden.org.

January is a book reading month for gardeners. Here’s my top ten from 2009:

1. “Sibley Guide to Trees,” by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, $39.95). Thousands of paintings featuring well chosen details will help you identify trees even in winter. In fact Sibley, known for his celebrated bird guides, says this is the best time to observe the unique architecture of each species and he has painted many trees in their winter form. With native trees the most vulnerable and important plants endangered by climate change, we need to sharpen our awareness of wild trees of the woodlands which provide oxygen, food, shelter and erosion control for our ecosystem and which are very different from the cloned exotic trees we plant in our backyard gardens as pampered pets.

2.”Beatrix Farrand; Private Gardens, Public Landscapes,” by Judith B. Tankard (Monacelli Press/Random House, $60). Like her famous aunt, Edith Wharton, Farrand escaped the gilded cage of the Gilded Age through professional success in a man’s field. One of the first women landscape architecture, she is survived by the magnificent Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., which is now a research institute of Harvard University, but not by her own famous garden on Mount Desert. Tankard explains how that was lost.
 
3. “Great Gardens of America,”  by Tim Richardson, photographed by Andrea Jones (Frances Lincoln Ltd., $50). A Londoner selects 25 iconic American and tries to explain what’s American about them. Farrand’s Dumbarton Oaks is featured as is Fletcher Steele’s Naumkeag in Stockbridge.

4.”Hidcote; The Making of a Garden” by Ethne Carke  (Norton, $45). I’m a fan of this great garden, which combines Italianate and English elements. Now here’s the story behind it. The creator, Lawrence Johnston was an American contemporary of Henry James and Edith Wharton in Britain and his masterpiece is now preserved by the National Trust and visited by 100,000 people a year.

5. There are few garden writers as pleasant to stay indoors with as Connecticut based houseplant expert Tovah Martin.  She rediscovers and updates a classic Victorian garden technique in “The New Terrarium; Creating Beautiful Displays for Plants and Nature,” with photographs by Kindra Clineff (Clarkson Potter, $25). They show how to use glass containers ranging from old aquariums and apothecary jars to antique Wardian cases to create miniature enclosed environments with the high humidity craved by orchids, mosses, begonias, ferns and many other plants. Most resources listed are located in New England.

6. “Home Outside; Creating the Landscape You Love,” by Julie Moir Messervy  (The Taunton Press, $30) This book takes gardeners through six steps to release their “inner designer.” It helps home lovers make their outdoor spaces as comfortable and beautiful as their interiors.  I like the “before” and “after” photos (which I always find more trustworthy in garden design books than drawings.) 

7. Scent is a sense too often underused in gardens. “Fragrant Designs,” edited by Beth Hanson (Brooklyn Botanic Garden, $9.95). lists of the most fragrant roses, bulbs, etc., and suggests plant combinations for scented paths and container gardens.  

8. “Deer-Resistant Landscaping; Proven Advice and Strategies for Outwitting Deer and 20 Other Pesky Mammals,” by Neil Soderstrom (Rodale Inc., $23.95). It includes more than a thousand plants considered unpalatable plus seasonally adjusted defensive strategies for this turf battle.

9. “Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! Notes from a Gloucester Garden,” written and illustrated by Kim Smith, (David R. Godine, $35) captures the rapture of a gardener’s journey through her own evolving quarter acre by integrating Smith’s personal essays, hand’s-on advice, and paintings.

10. “The Toronto Music Garden” (Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio, Inc., $15),  Messervy celebrates the 10th anniversary of her garden design collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma. Their award winning garden interprets the six movements of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 through plantings and pathways that invite different moods and even gaits of walking. Originally proposed for windswept City Hall Plaza, it met with Menino administration disinterest,  and  was snatched by the city of Toronto, which arranged much of the funding and permitting in a single day. It’s the public garden that got away.

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