Four Steps You Should Take This Winter for Your Dream Garden Next Year
Winter may not seem like a gardener’s favorite time of year, but there is plenty to do, namely planning for next year. Huddled under the blankets in front of the fire, you can reflect on your wins and losses over the past year and focus on how to turn them into wins next year. Here are the steps I go through every winter to ensure I have a better garden next year.
Rate the past season
I highly recommend two tools for assessing where you went wrong (and where you got it right). The first is a garden journal in which you can jot down ideas, implementations, seed orders, sketches of future beds or trellises, and general thoughts. There’s no need to write in it every day—it’s a place to keep track of your observations as they happen. Too often I find that I simply forget how I felt about how things are when I sit down in the winter. It is very important to record them in real time. Your phone is a great place for this; it doesn’t have to be a formal book on physical pages.
You should also keep a visual journal —photos of your garden that you take from different angles throughout the seasons. Your Instagram account is fine, or store them in a folder in the cloud. The point is to be able to go back and look at your yard as it ages over the course of the season because it changes. Flowers present in early spring will disappear after a few weeks. You can even use this visual reference to check if your tomatoes were ripe at the same time last summer as they were last summer.
Look at all the pictures, read all the entries, and then combine and consolidate all the observations on one page: a list of everything you learned from last season. I usually have things like: Tomatoes in Sunrise Sauce were favorites; eggplants don’t get enough sun in back beds; the pea trellis in the back beds looks terrible; plant green beans two weeks earlier; Don’t grow purple peas anymore . I study the photos for holes in the landscape and translate this into notes: need more yellow early tulips in the western bed; Plant more dahlias along the fence line.
Turn observations into results
If you have a list that you think contains all the hits from last summer and advises you to skip the misses, you can come up with a plan. Turn each item on your list into something that requires action. For example, my note on tomatoes with sunrise sauce is: “Grow at least six plants with sunrise sauce”; For green beans: “Plant beans at 7/1.”
I tend to break them down into groups. First, infrastructure, which includes things like trellises, anything I need 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 in the season (annuals are sown and planted quite early, and perennials wait later in the season while annuals are still growing), it’s helpful to break them down into separate groups.
From here I make a list of everything I’d like to grow this year and how much of each I’d like. I’m not worried about varieties at this point – I’m just focusing on which vegetables and herbs. I’ll tell you about the varieties later, when the seed catalogs come out. Your journal is a good place for this list because it means you can always easily refer back to last year’s list for reference.
Create a layout
For years I had a rough sketch of my beds and used it every year to plan my spring, summer and fall gardens. One of the best investments I ever made was to get out a tape measure and create a scale diagram of my yard. Once I have the outline saved, I can print out copies each year and start plotting where everything will go. It’s a fantastic planning tool, meaning that when you’re sitting on the couch in December, you know exactly how many plants can fit in the bed (taking a truck out to measure in the snow and rain is terrible).
Start with results. Write in pencil. See how this clashes with the plants you plant each year and start looking through your inventory to see where they might fit. This will affect how many of each plant you can install. This practice of planning out where things might go gives a nice taste of reality before you start ordering seeds. This will also show you what additional infrastructure may be required. I love looking online for inspiration for new building projects and sketching out what I can build in the spring.
Order seed catalogs
Around now, seed companies are starting to publish seed catalogs for next year. Most of them still send out physical copies, but you can search online instead. Although I am a dedicated online shopper, I love receiving seed catalogs in the mail. They’re gorgeous, full of color photos, and inspiring new varieties you’ll want to plant.
In the meantime, visit all the seed store sites you usually like and subscribe to the catalogs. They will arrive in December and January. At this point I start digging through them and making lists of the varieties of each plant that seem interesting to me. Since I now know how many of each plant I have room for, I can use this to help narrow down the seeds I will buy. (If I can only grow six tomatoes, buying 10 different varieties doesn’t make sense.)
Once I’ve made my wish list, I’ll spend a few weeks getting it into a coherent order after I’ve checked my current seed supply. Seed orders must arrive no later than early February; this is when you will start to notice that many varieties are already sold out.