Winter may not seem like a gardener’s favorite season, but there are many things to enjoy, including planning for next year. Huddled under blankets in front of the fire, you can contemplate your wins and losses from last year and focus on how to translate that into wins for next year. Here are the steps I take each winter to ensure that next year I will have my most beautiful garden yet.

Review of the past season

I highly recommend two tools to assess where you went wrong (and right). The first is a garden journalwhere you can jot down ideas, achievements, seed orders, sketches of future vegetable gardens or trellises and general thoughts. No need to write in it every day: it’s a place to keep track of your observations as you have them. Too often I find that I have simply forgotten how I felt about the way things were as I sit down in the winter. Writing them in real time is essential. Your phone is a good place for this; it doesn’t have to be a formal book of physical pages.

You should also use a visual diary—photos you take of your garden from different angles throughout the seasons. Your Instagram account is working fine, or keep them in a folder in the cloud. The goal is to be able to go back and watch your garden as it ages through the season because it changes. The flowers present in early spring will disappear a few weeks later. You can even use this visual reference to check if, for example, your tomatoes were ripe at the same time last summer as they were the summer before.

Go through all the images, read all the notes, then group and consolidate all the observations onto one page: a list of everything you learned from last season. Mine usually has things like: The Sunrise Sauce tomatoes were the favorite; eggplants don’t get enough sun in the beds; the trellis for the peas in the back beds looks terrible; plant green beans two weeks earlier; no longer grow purple peas. I study the photos looking for holes in the landscape and translate that into notes: Need more early yellow tulips in the west bed; plant more dahlias along the fence.

Translate observations into deliverables

Once you have a list that you think capitalizes on all the successes from last summer and advises you to avoid the failures, you can develop a plan. Turn each item on the list into something actionable. For example, my note on Sunrise Sauce tomatoes becomes “grow at least six Sunrise Sauce plants”; regarding green beans, “plant green beans before 7/1”.

I tend to divide them into groups. First, the infrastructure, which includes things like trellises, anything I need to build or repair, tools I might need, etc. Next, vegetables and herbs, then annual and perennial flowers. Since I’m dealing with annuals and perennials at different times of the season (annuals are seeded and planted fairly early, while perennials wait until later in the season while the annuals grow), it’s helpful to divide them into distinct groups.

From there, I create an inventory of all the things I’d like to grow this year, and how many of each I’d like to grow. At this point I don’t care about varieties, I just focus on types of vegetables and herbs. I’ll talk about varieties later when the seed catalogs are released. Your calendar is a good place for this list, because it means you can always easily look back at last year’s list for reference.

Create a layout

For many years I had a sketch of my flower beds and used it each year to plan my spring, summer and fall gardens. One of the best investments I ever made was getting out the tape measure and creating a schematic of my garden, to scale. Once the diagram is saved, I can print copies each year and start working out where everything will go. It’s a fantastic planning tool, and means that, sitting on the couch in December, you know precisely how many plants will fit in a garden bed (trucking it outside to measure in the snow and the rain is miserable).

Start with the deliverables. Write in pencil. See how it conflicts with the items you plant each year and start going through the inventory, determining where things might fit. This will affect the number of each plant you can install. This practice of pointing out where everything can go is a good reality check before you start ordering seeds. This will also show you what additional infrastructure might be needed. I enjoy looking online for inspiration on new structural designs and sketching out what I might build in the spring.

Order seed catalogs

Right now, seed companies are starting to release seed catalogs for next year. Most still send physical copies, but you can search online instead. Although I am a dedicated online shopper, I love receiving seed catalogs in the mail. They are beautiful, full of color photos and inspire all the new varieties you will want to plant.

For now, visit all the seed house sites you usually like and sign up for the catalogs. They will arrive in December and January. At this point I start going through them and making lists of varieties of each plant that sound exciting to me. Since I know at this point how many plants I have room for, I can use that to determine which seeds I will purchase. (If I can only grow six tomatoes, buying 10 different varieties doesn’t make sense.)

Once I have created my wish list, I will spend a few weeks narrowing it down into a coherent order after checking my current seed inventory. Seed orders should not be placed beyond early February; this is when you will start to notice that many varieties are already sold out.