This is going to be a big year for me as a gardener, a watershed year, a year in which I learn a lot about myself.

Nancy and I have been growing plants on this property since September of 1975, and we have worked out a pretty good division of labor. I plan and plant the vegetable garden, and I do most of the harvesting. I also take care of the lawn, such as it is.

Nancy plans the perennial and shrub gardens. I join her for major expansions, planting bulbs and shrubs, and when we mulch and fertilize. She does all the flower cutting.

And she has done all the weeding, in the flower gardens and the vegetable garden. I have always said I would take care of the vegetable garden, but it hasn’t happened. There have been excuses. Work for the newspaper and a business that Nancy and I have together has kept me occupied during the daylight hours from Monday through Friday. The only time I have had to tend our property has been weekends, and other projects have always seemed more important than weeding.

This year that will change. I no longer work full time at the newspaper. I write two columns a week from home. Nancy and I will continue our business, but I will have evenings free. In the cold of January I swear that I will keep the gardens weed-free, pick the vegetables and fruit before they get over-ripe. I will keep a closer eye out for harmful insects and diseases and just be a better gardener and do all the tasks that good gardeners do.

I also hope to spend a few evenings fishing the local streams for trout, but the garden will come first — if I am true to my word.

The first test of my new resolve is going to be the strawberries. We planted strawberries very shortly after moving into this house, and while the strawberry bed has been moved and replanted a few times, we have grown them ever since. And mostly we have had pretty good crops.

The good crops stopped two years ago. For the first failure, we had an excuse. In 2010 the spring was crazily early, and then there was a hard frost in mid-May that damaged the strawberry blossoms. That year, the entire state had a bad year for strawberries.

Last year, our strawberries just failed. In commercial strawberry operations the third year after planting is best, and then plants are dug up and replanted after about five years. We had left ours in too long and the beds got overtaken by weeds.

Nancy spent hours and hours late last summer weeding through the strawberry beds, and when she was done there were few strawberry plants remaining. We are going to replant this year, and it is going to be my job — with all my extra free time — to keep the strawberries weed-free.

We are going to plant Sparkle strawberries. We planted Sparkle early in our gardening careers because that is what Nancy’s grandparents grew on their farm. But over the years we have tried different varieties: Earliglow so we could get berries earlier, Mesabi because it was rated well in state trials and others that I can’t remember.

I had thought the fascination with Sparkle strawberries was just something from Nancy’s family, but a couple of years ago when I was talking with Rodney Voisine, who is growing Saskatoons on his Cape Elizabeth farm, he rhapsodized over Sparkles. I promised myself then that we were going back to Sparkles. They don’t travel well, and the berries aren’t especially large, so commercial growers don’t like them. But they just taste right.

I have no other major goals for this year’s garden, but I do have some minor goals. The first year granddaughter Maeve asked us to grow watermelon in our garden, we had great success. We have had no luck since. I intend to figure out what I did right that first year and repeat it.

We have always had good success growing potatoes, but I never have figured a successful way to steal the wonderfully delicious new potatoes in early July without killing the entire plant. We all love boiled new potatoes, especially when served with fresh peas, and I want to make sure we have plenty of them this year.

And while I don’t care about a perfect weed-free lawn, I do want to get something to grow in the bare spots.

I am sure we will come up with a lot of other things we want to try after looking through the garden catalogs that are stacked up in our family room. This year, as in the past, I am not looking at the gardening catalogs until the New Year arrives. It helps brighten the dark days of winter.

Getting back to my plans to work longer in the gardens now that I am semi-retired: Nancy and I made another change in our lives that will help me stay outdoors longer.

We cut back our cable-television subscription so that we no longer get NESN, which carries the Red Sox games. That means I will have more incentive to be outdoors, listening to the games on my radio headset while I am doing my chores.

Tom Atwell has been writing the Maine Gardener column since 2004. He is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth and can be contacted at 767-2297 or at:

tomatwell@me.com