Four Steps You Should Take This Winter for Your Dream Garden Next Year

Winter might not seem like a gardener's favorite season, but there's a lot to enjoy-namely, planning for next year. While cuddled up under blankets in front of the fire, you can contemplate your wins and losses for the last year and focus on how to translate that to wins for next year. Here are the steps I walk through each winter to ensure next year I'll have my best garden yet.

Assess the past season

I highly recommend two tools for assessing where you've gone wrong (and right). The first is a garden journal, where you can jot ideas, realizations, seed orders, sketches of future vegetable beds or trellises, and general thoughts. No need to write in it every day-it's a place to keep track of your observations as you have them. Too often, I find that I have simply forgotten how I felt about how things were going by the time I sit down in winter time. Writing them down in real time is essential. Your phone is a fine place for this; it doesn't have to be a formal book of physical pages.

You should also use a visual diary-photos you take of your garden from various angles throughout the seasons. Your Instagram account is fine, or keep them in a folder in the cloud. The point is to be able to go back and look at your yard as it aged through the season, because it changes. Flowers present in early spring will be gone a few weeks later. You can even use this visual reference to check if, for instance, your tomatoes became ripe the same time last summer as the summer before.

Go through all the pictures, read all the notes, and thenaggregate and consolidate all the observations to one page: a list of everything you learned from the last season. Mine usually has things like: Sunrise Sauce tomatoes were favorites; eggplants don't get enough sun in back beds; trellis for peas in back beds looks terrible; plant green beans two weeks earlier; don't grow purple peas again. I study the photos for holes in the landscape and translate that to notes: Need more yellow early tulips in the west bed; plant more dahlias along the fence line.

Translate observations to deliverables

Once you have a list that you feel capitalizes on all the hits from last summer and advises you to skip the misses, you can develop a plan. Turn each item from the list into an actionable item. For instance, my note about Sunrise Sauce tomatoes becomes grow at least six Sunrise Sauce plants"; regarding green beans, plant haricot verts by 7/1".

I tend to break these into groups. First, infrastructure, which includes items like trellises, anything I have to build or fix, tools I might need, etc. Then vegetables and herbs, and then annual flowers and perennials. Since I deal with annuals and perennials at different times of the season (annuals get seeded and planted quite early, while perennials wait for later in the season while the annuals are out growing), breaking them into separate groups is helpful.

From here, I create an inventory of all the things I would like to grow this year, and how many of each I'd like. At this point, I don't worry about varieties-I just focus on what kind of vegetables and herbs. I'll get into varieties later when the seed catalogs come out. Your diary is a good place for this list, since it means you can always look back at the last year's list easily for reference.

Create a layout

For many years, I had a rough sketch of my garden beds and I would use that each year to plan my spring, summer and fall gardens. One of the best investments I ever made was getting out the tape measure and creating a schematic of my yard, to scale. With the schematic saved, I can print out copies each year, and start laying in where everything will go. It's a fantastic planning tool, and it means that while sitting on the couch in December, you know precisely how many plants can fit into a garden bed (trucking outside to measure in the snow and rain is miserable).

Start with the deliverables. Write in pencil. See how this conflicts with the items you plant each year, and start going down the inventory, figuring out where things might fit in. This will affect how many of each plant you can install. This practice of laying out where everything might go is a good smack of reality before you begin ordering seeds. This will also show you what additional infrastructure might be needed. I love to look online for inspiration on new designs for structures, and sketch out what I might build come spring.

Order seed catalogs

About now, seed companies begin publishing the seed catalogs for next year. Most still send out physical copies, but you can search online, instead. While I am a dedicated online shopper, I love getting seed catalogs in the mail. They are gorgeous, full of color photos, and inspiration of all the new varieties you'll want to plant.

For now, visit all the seed house sites you usually love, and sign up for catalogs. They'll arrive in December and January. At that point I start digging through them, and making lists of varieties of each plant that sound exciting to me. Since I know at this point how many of each plant I have room for, I can use that to winnow down what seeds I'll buy. (If I can only grow six tomatoes, buying 10 different varieties makes no sense.)

Once I have created my wish list, I'll spend a few weeks whittling it down into a coherent order after I have checked my current seed inventory. Orders for seeds shouldn't go out later than beginning of February; that's when you'll start to notice many varieties are sold out already.