While my memory's fresh, I'll make my do-and-don't lists for 2016 vegetable and flower gardens

I might have exaggerated a wee bit in a recent blog post, when I wrote that I had ordered and received six billion tulip and daffodil bulbs. The actual total was closer to six hundred – nearly all of which I planted during a three-day weekend, in 16 hours of gardening. My husband put in nearly as many hours, rototilling the new bulb gardens, mixing compost into our raised vegetable beds, and planting two shrubs in the backyard. (I know: we are the poster couple for romantic weekend getaways – to the compost pile, garden shed and the Church of Dirt and Flowers.) As I inched along the planting beds on my creaking knees, mentally designing color combinations for grouping the bulbs, my mantra was Think Springtime. I pictured the new tulips and daffodils joining their veteran bulb buddies to create blooming waves of red, purple, orange, yellow, pink, and white petals bordering the perennial beds in our front yard. [Note: I have ordered tulip, daffodil and other spring-flowering bulbs from VanBourgondien (dutchbulbs.com) and Breck's (brecks.com) for years, and appreciate the fat, healthy bulbs I receive at planting time.]

Now most of our flower beds are ready for autumn blankets of compost – except for the sunflower garden outside my office window. As I write, finches and chickadees are hanging upside-down from the tall stalks, harvesting the last of the seeds from flower heads nearly bald from the little birds' unrelenting appetites. I love this unexpected bonus of garden joy so much that, next spring, I'll move the tomato bed elsewhere and plant only sunflowers (for the birds) and hollyhocks (for the bees) below my window.

During my recent bulb-planting-palooza, I had company in the garden. Abigail, our chickadee-sushi-loving cat, and chief staffer Tessa the Vague, our calico – whose already limited battery power grows dimmer every day – each took a turn as my supervisor. Abby complained that the noise from Lee's rototiller in the side yard was giving her a migraine (and scaring off her luncheon plans.) Tessa wandered about, startling at every oak leaf that crunched under her paws, until she finally settled in the middle of the narrow bed I was planting. I didn't disturb her, because her safe touchdown in an actual garden site is a rare event. She napped for awhile, and then rolled around awkwardly in the newly composted patch before beginning her long, complex trek to find the cat door. Meanwhile, Benjamin BadKitten, the deposed chief, did not set even one fat paw in the garden with me all weekend. He was too busy doing research, he explained with a snooty lift of his nose. Halloween is coming, and he was calculating the algorithm required to stuff my chief garden staffer into a pumpkin.

We impetuous gardeners cannot count on memory alone to remember our plans for next year's plantings. In my decades of gardening, I wonder how many fabulously brilliant ideas I lost between the blue and gold of October's skies and the pink and green of May's gardens. No matter how certain I was that I would remember exactly the changes I'd make, some of those bright thought-bubbles floated away before I'd even filled the Christmas stockings. Many of my family members and friends rely on their smart phones for keeping schedules and lists. I, the geezer who still has an aol.com email address (it's so ancient, it's now retro-hip,) use a paper-and-pen weekly planner. Every week during take-down-the-garden month, usually October, I note which varieties of seeds tanked and which triumphed. (Guess which column has the most entries.) I always buy next year's planner early, so I have it in autumn, and I can make my to-do lists on the calendar pages for next April, May and June.

On my 2016 list, I'll write these three items in big letters at the top:

• Don't cave to cheap thrills and set more than one zucchini plant in the raised bed. Remember you're the only one who will eat the Zs, and that you don't eat much sweet stuff like zucchini bread. Remember the nightly dinners of baked, roasted and sauteed zukes, egged, floured and herbed, in hopes of revving up their blandness? Remember that the blandness never really disappeared?
• Plant the tomatoes in big, individual pots and set them on the sunny, south-facing patio. A few years ago, they grew well in their patio pots and tasted sweet and juicy. (We would have enjoyed many more tomatoes that summer, but our late, beloved golden retriever, Kaylee, stole them off the vines, even after we wrapped the plants in plastic netting. That dog loved her 'matoes.)
• Do not plant any more bulbs. At all. Anywhere. Do not gaze out onto the backyard shrubbery beds and imagine how well the taller shrubs would set off flowering clusters of tulips, daffodils and grape hyacinths along the length of the fence. Imagine, instead, how much hard labor those beds would need to become bulb-ready. There's bad dirt out there, and it would need digging, amending, fertilizing, rototilling, and more digging before you could sink to your aching knees (which will be a full year older and creakier) and start planting six billion more bulbs. But...can't you just see those gorgeous parrot tulips,pink and yellow angeliques, deep red couleur cardinals, the giant trumpet daffodils…?Stop that right now. Smack yourself on the forehead. Do not plant any more bulbs. Anywhere. At all.

What will be on your own “do or don't” lists for next year's garden?