In which there's a new year and I'm wishing for Spring in the veg garden!

 It's cold, it's dark, and I'm tired all the time.  When will Spring come to my garden?

Yes, I would like some cheese with my w(h)ine.

Not so fast, buckaroo.  

Although you can start sowing seeds indoors in January, I find that sowing so early gives me weak, leggy seedlings that struggle when it's time to put them outdoors to cope with the world.

Early seed starting in 2025 gave me a lot of seedlings that had no room in the garden!

Instead:

If you started planning your beds back in November when I wrote about that, now is a terrific time to start making those beds exist in real space.  

• Build walls for your raised beds and put them in place
• Put up fencing where needed to protect your garden from marauding chickens or children
• Start (or continue) dumping compost and/or stall cleanings onto the spaces where you want to grow things. 
• If the site is very weedy (like all my gardens are this winter), or if you have limited amounts of compost to dump on the spaces, start killing the weeds by laying down cardboard. 

One of my annual winter tasks is to dump enormous amounts of hogsfuel (very rough-cut bark and wood chips) onto garden pathways.  This deters weeds and gives visitors--including the gardener--a defined place to walk and will keep those compacting feet out of your growing beds.

Moving hogsfuel to pathways in winter helps the garden in spring

If the weather is too awful to spend a lot of time outdoors, as our January/February weather tends to be, you can console yourself by mapping out your garden on paper or using an online planner.

I use the GROWVEG online planner for my gardens.  It's not a perfect product, as it favors things like straight lines and square corners, which are rare at Haiku Farm.  But it does give me an online space to track what I've grown in the past (and where).

I also use the app to keep track of which crops worked 

I grew so many cukes (and pickled them) in 2025 that I won't be growing any in 2026.

Jim learned a lot about blueberry bushes in his Master Gardener classes
and took over caretaking them--which they loved!

My records say that these corn and sunflower plants
were armpit high by 4th of July

and which didn't (and why).  

Note to self:  harvest corn before the raccoons harvest it for me

Yes, I have to fence my dog away from the peas or he will eat them all!

Because we have three veg garden areas, plus a berry garden, plus various fruit trees to tend, getting all the information in one spot is helpful.  

Here's a screenshot for one of the 2026 garden plans

The good thing about using an app is that I can move crops around in virtual space from the comfort of my recliner, and I can also make notes about what's growing well (or what has been decimated by aphids) when I'm actually out in the middle of the garden.  The app also keeps the perennials (like the rhubarb and raspberries shown above) in the same places year-on-year, so I don't have to re-enter that info.

If you are new to growing food, there's no need to start out so big.  A quick sketch on paper might do you just as well, if you prefer something tangible.  

As always, choose something that will work for you.  But if you sketch on paper, I recommend you take a photo of your sketch before you get garden mud on the paper and the whole thing becomes illegible.

Ask me how I know.