If you’re a serious gardener, the fall and winter months can be a difficult time; the best you can do is look at seed catalogs, plan your garden out for the next year, and chow down on the frozen or canned efforts of this year’s harvest.

Or is that all you can do? What if you’re really craving something fresh? You could go to the store and pay a hefty price for something that has no taste, hoping that will satisfy you. Or, you could look at winter gardening. Kale, collards, and other cold tolerant crops can be sowed outdoors, and you could be having kale salads in February or home-grown tomatoes and lettuce from indoor container gardens in December, with just a bit of creativity.

If you’re rural, you have lots of insulation to protect cold weather hardy crops from temperatures below freezing; leaves raked from the hillsides and over things like collards and kale will blanket them in warmth and protect the plants from the worst of the cold. If it snows, that’s just an extra blanket to provide warmth. Just uncover your plants when it’s sunny and the temperature goes above 32. Cold hardy crops that can withstand frost and freezing conditions, especially if protected by leaves, include: kale, spinach, lettuce, collards, carrots, beets, parsnips, and even cabbage, onions, and garlic. I have lettuce growing in a raised bed over the winter for the second year in a row; I just put a cover over it when the weather gets really bad.

For indoor container gardening, there are the obvious choices such as herbs, microgreens, lettuce, and arugula, but you should also consider green beans that don’t need a trellis, tommy toes or other small tomatoes that do well in a container, peppers, even potatoes and sweet potatoes. I just planted some potatoes in a container that had sprouted, hoping to enjoy them for the new year. Each bean plant or pepper plant or tomato plant should be in a 5 gallon bucket in order to give it room to grow; anything smaller, and it won’t do well. I repurpose those large kitty litter pails for this purpose.

Light can be an issue for successful container gardening, especially if you’re surrounded by hills that further limit any direct sunlight over the fall and winter months. Grow lights can be expensive. Cheapie shop lights, though, can provide just what your indoor plants need. Just find a spot or two where you intend to put your plants, and install the shop lights. I got a shop type shelf, and attached a shop light under the top shelf. Provides enough light with what I get from nearby windows that whatever is on the shelves does well. Plus, with it being a shop shelf, the shelves are tall enough and deep enough for those 5 gallon buckets if you set the height between shelves a bit more than normal.

So, if your gardening fingers are still twitching, and looking at seed catalogs while planning out next year’s garden just isn’t enough, consider giving winter gardening a try.