Once your plot is prepared, mark out the beds or rows you plan to use, and start planting whatever crop(s) are appropriate to the season, following recommendations for spacing and fertilizer.

It’s tempting to think that you can or should plant your whole garden at once, but because some crops cannot tolerate cold at the beginning of the season, the garden will fill up only gradually.

As you move through the summer and early fall, some plants will reach maturity and you’ll want to take them out, potentially replacing them with other crops. Other plants (long-season crops like parsnips or winter squash) will just stay in place, growing all season long.

Weeding and Watering are both very critical in this season as well.

As the days get shorter and the weather gets colder in the fall, some plants will begin to die even before there is a frost. Check the weather online or in the newspaper for predictions of the first frost in your area (“frost” occurs at or close to a temperature of 0 C/32 F).

When there is about to be a frost, there are a number of things you may wish to do in your garden before the frost, including harvesting all remaining tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and cucumbers, and potentially covering some of your greens or other vegetables with floating row cover to keep them warm.

When you’ve done however much (or little) work you want to do to prepare your garden for winter, there’s not much to do until January or February, which is when many gardeners start to think about what they want to grow and begin ordering seeds.

If you are interested in starting plants inside, February is not too early to begin preparing for this. Expanding seed starting soil pods will come in handy and make starting your seeds indoors much easier.