Take photos and review what you do from year to year to learn more about your landscape. That record will make it easier to make pruning, planting, and pest-prevention decisions in the future.
"To grow healthy food requires a vibrant diversity of plants, animals and soil life. These form the immune system of your land that together help each other to sustain the farm. The soil we work with as part of a farm organism needs our help to be healthy.”
-- Lia Babitch, seed garden manager at Turtle Tree Seed
In planning the garden my emphasis is on staple crops that store without any preparation and fit into the existing storage “infrastructure.” Additional priorities include planting produce that is expensive to purchase in winter or not available organically grown.
In the first of her biweekly columns about growing and gardening in the Berkshires, Judy Isacoff writes: "Stars, the sunlit moon and planets circle the expanse of frozen, fertile ground during these long nights. There’s the sense of a night shift at work underground."