This year’s plan to master my garden

I've got bulbs pushing their heads through two of the eight containers I planted up for spring in my garden but I'm not sure what they are because I wrote all my plant labels in indelible ink and the words have come off already. One lot looks like Iris reticulata, which I don't remember planting, and the other has a tulip leaf but as the squirrels have walked off with that particular plant label, only time will tell.

Sometimes it's more fun that way, but this is the year I'm going to do things differently. By which I mean properly. And a good place to start is by making back-up notes in my RHS diary of everything I plant so that indelible pens and insouciant squirrels no longer play a major role in my life. I'm prepared to sacrifice serendipity for control.

No more sketching crop rotation diagrams for the allotment on the backs of envelopes, either. Those, too, will go into the diary, so I can see at a glance where my legumes were three years ago.

So far, so organised. Next: no more buying seed on impulse, only to get home and establish that I've got enough packets of Jubilee Hysor broad beans to last until the Olympics and beyond. And why am I constantly seduced by wild flower seed? My wild flower area is the size of a postage stamp and has been swamped by teasels. I must accept that a wild flower meadow is a non-starter in a 20ft by 30ft urban patch.

I am determined to turn the compost heap regularly and cut it with cardboard and paper so that what has been, on occasion, a soggy, fruit fly-infested vegetable dump becomes a sweet-smelling mountain of friable soil improver and brandling worms.

Now for the garden shed. This is the key to everything and a constant reproach. Until I get a cold frame, my kitchen will be knee-deep in seed trays every spring but until I clear out the shed, which is stuffed with my predecessor's out-of-date pesticides, Calor gas cylinders, tools, hundreds of (unwashed) plastic plant pots and old hose then store in it the garden furniture stacked against the outside of the kitchen wall, I've no room for the much-coveted glass sanity-saver. That makes clearing the shed a priority.

I can feel my mind becoming tidier and more logical as I write: I really think I can make a go of this. Orderly shed, competent compost heap, prudent seed buying, meticulous records - what else? How about preparing and planting the allotment at the same time as other gardeners instead of a month after everyone else? I sowed my tomatoes so late last year most of them barely reached puberty.

Shed, compost, seeds, records, time-keeping - I really think I'm getting the hang of this. 2009 - the year I took control of my gardening. Now all I have to do is knock the rest of my life into some sort of shape. Or shall I leave that for 2010?