Reading Your Season Back and Planning Next Spring
Okay. This is the last lesson in this module, and honestly it's my favorite one to teach, because it's the one where all the notes you took actually pay off.
Here's the thing nobody tells beginners. The garden is basically over by now, or close to it, and everybody's temptation is to just clean up the beds, close the gate, and forget the whole thing happened until next April. Don't do that. Right now, while it's still fresh, is when you sit down and figure out what actually happened this year. Next spring you, standing in the nursery aisle trying to remember if the peppers did okay, will thank this year you.
Walk the garden one more time with a notebook
Before you pull anything or till anything under, walk your beds and just look. Not to work, just to look. What's still producing that you didn't expect. What gave up in July and never came back. What's a mess of aphid damage or powdery mildew that you're still not totally sure what it was.
Write it down. I don't care if you're not a writer. My journal has more pencil sketches than sentences in it, and half the sketches are squash leaves I still can't identify past "the one with the big leaves." I showed one to Keith once and he asked if it was a map. It's fine. Nobody's grading the drawing. The point is you'll remember more of what actually happened this way than if you just try to hold it in your head, because by February you will not remember which tomato variety got hit hardest by that one cold snap.
What to actually record
Keep it simple. For each bed or each crop, jot down:
- Sow or transplant date, and whether that timing felt too early, too late, or fine.
- What thrived and what sulked. Be specific. "The bush beans" not "the vegetables."
- Any problem you had a name for — aphids, squash bugs, blossom end rot — and roughly when it showed up.
- Water notes, if you kept any. Did you end up watering more or less than you planned.
- One thing you'd change. Just one. You can always add more later, but forcing yourself to name one thing keeps you from writing a novel you'll never reread.
That white crust I found creeping up the soil surface in my raised beds a few Augusts back, that's in my journal from the year I finally figured out it was my hard well water doing it, not some disease. Took me embarrassingly long to connect that dot. If I hadn't written down "weird white stuff on soil, early August" that first year, I might not have caught the pattern the second year either.
Read it back against the calendar
Now pull out whatever you used to track frost dates this year, your max/min thermometer readings, whenever that last hard freeze actually hit your yard in spring and the first one hit in fall. Line that up against your planting dates.
This is where you catch your own mistakes before you repeat them. If your carrots rotted because you sowed too early into cold ground, that's a note for a popsicle stick next year with the real date on it, not the seed packet's date. Packet dates are written for somewhere warmer than here. Your own journal, with your own yard's actual frost dates in it, beats any packet every time.
Sketch out next spring, roughly
You don't need a finished plan tonight. But take ten minutes and rough out:
- What you're moving, because it did badly where it was or you just want to rotate it.
- What you're not growing again. It's fine to give up on something. I've fully given up on basil. Everything else in my garden does great and the basil just sulks and dies, every single year, and I've stopped pretending I'll figure out why. I buy it now.
- What worked so well you want more of it. My first real win, years back, was a row of bush beans that produced more than we could eat. I gave grocery bags of it away and felt a little smug about it, and I still grow extra beans every year because of that one row.
A word about protecting the beds themselves
If you're leaving your raised beds empty over winter, throw a layer of mulch or compost on top rather than leaving bare dirt exposed. Our winters aren't brutal but the freeze-thaw cycle here does move soil around, and bare dirt loses structure faster than covered dirt. It's a five-minute job now that saves you soil work in spring.
And if you built a cold frame this year, this is a good time to check the hinges and the glazing before you put it away. Mine's an old storm window over scrap two-by-fours, built over one weekend, and it's ugly as anything, I've got eleven photos of it on my phone from four different angles because I was so pleased with myself. But the wood's outside all winter and every fall I check that the window still seats right and nothing's warped. Costs me ten minutes. Skipping it costs me a February afternoon rebuilding a hinge in the cold, which I've also done.
Before next time
Before our next class, walk your garden once with a notebook or your phone and just capture what's still alive, what died early, and one thing you'd do differently. That's the whole assignment. You'll thank yourself in April.
- D