Happy 2010 to all my gardening friends and fellow bloggers.  This being the first day of the month, and a new year to boot, it's time for me to fess up one of the many gardening oops – GOOPs for short – I've made in my three-plus decades of garden dabbling.

My tale starts way back in 2008, when seed catalogs for 2009 began arriving in December.  Is it just me, or didn't they used to arrive right after Christmas, but in time for perusing on New Year's Day?  When seed catalogs showed up amongst holiday cards, donation pleas, and last minute holiday catalog enticements that there's still time to order, I stacked them, along with the winter issues of numerous gardening magazines, in a pile for later reading.  Well, one family/work obligation led to another and before I knew it February had arrived … in fact it was half over … and I had not yet completed my seed shopping list.  Now think back to last winter.  All the BIG gardening news focused on how many people were planning to start their own seeds and plant their own gardens – it was the modern-day victory garden trend.  Every news outlet had some sort of story on the virtues and economics of home-grown food.  Why even the White House was planning a vegetable garden!  All this interest – which is a very, very good thing – caused an overwhelming number of orders to seed companies.  This, in turn, caused a delay in shipping seeds out to anxiously awaiting gardeners, which of course resulted in the late-orderers, such as moi, getting seed orders way too close or after recommended indoor starting dates.  Granted, I was able to start seeds leftover from some of my previous year's packets, but I wanted my new seeds too!

I'm not a New Year's resolution maker, but this year I'm resolving to spend my New Year's weekend scrutinizing my 2009 garden journal and 2010 seed catalogues – all with the goal of getting my orders out in early January.  In fact, were you able to peek through cyberspace as you read this post, you would likely find me on my couch with a stack of seed catalogues in my lap.  I don't plan to come up short-seeded again.

Now it's your turn.  What's your GOOPs; what damn-I-wish-I-hadn't-done-that tale of woe can you share?  For some ideas just scroll through other GOOPs of mine - I've said this before and I'll say it again – if you haven't made a mistake you are not really gardening.

Share your GOOPs in a comment below or share it on your own blog (but be sure to give us a teaser and a link in a comment here).  We all learn best when we can learn from each other.