It’s winter. The calendar may still say “autumn” but -18 and snow is winter, darnit. Now that it’s winter, you can start thinking about what you’ll spend spring doing. I suggest that you plant a garden. As much as you feel you can manage — after a sober evaluation of your needs, space and abilities. The preparation part is easy. Weeding’s a pain, but necessary. The real challenge comes in the harvest.

If you’re growing a couple of containers of tomatoes to brighten up your salads, harvest is simply a matter of eating what’s ripe and waiting until the next one turns red. (Or yellow, or green, or purple. Tomatoes *are* the grooviest fruit.) If you’re trying to grow and harvest serious eat-it-all-winter food, you’d better have a plan and some knowledge.

Here’s how you get that plan and knowledge: Use this annotated bibliography as a study guide this winter. You can buy the books, or find them through your local library. I prefer to buy them, because I will refer back to them time and again, and it’s simple when they’re on my own bookshelves. Browse the suggested websites. Browse other sites and read other books as you come across them and find them interesting.

This is a project I did in collaboration with Penny Powers. Rather than post the whole thing here, I’m giving you this link to Chris Martenson’s blog because there’s a LOT of stuff there you probably should be reading. Let us know if you have other books and things you’d like to have added to the project. We’ll keep updating it as new stuff comes to our attention.