In April, the jewel garden is shining with bloom while the potager is yielding harvests of asparagus, lettuce, spinach, kale, mustard and other fresh, spring greens.

Imbolc is the traditional beginning of spring, when the world turns toward the light.

December has been mild but rainy, filling the valley with fog, but the garden still has vegetables to carry us through winter.

In November I begin looking forward to winter and the tasks still on my list … but I also rest in what I have accomplished.

In October, the weather cools and the vegetable garden turns the corner toward winter hibernation. The pantry shelves are loaded with preserves, and tender plants have moved into the greenhouse. But the garden season isn’t over.

As summer fades into autumn, the cycle of growth and harvest continues, but inexorably slows.

How and why we built terraces for our vegetable garden, the lessons we’ve learned, and what we’ve changed this year.

Last fall, I underplanted daffodils in our small apple orchard.

One hundred bulbs went into the ground — easier said than done, as the bulb digger we bought expressly for the purpose broke on the third bulb (booo) — all in a quest to recreate one of my favorite places. One of my parents’ neighbors had a deeply wooded hillside rising behind their house. Usually intensely private, one spring they invited us to hike up the hill behind their house in mid-March, when the maple buds were glowing. Up the hill, in a shallow glade, grew thousands of daffodils beneath the hickories, oaks and maples. Magic.

Spring has definitely arrived when the tulips bloom.

After a long, gray winter, their absolutely ludicrous depth of color, their wildly voluptuous shapes, help you understand why tulips once inspired a worldwide mania, speculative bubble, and economic crisis. They’re just that type of flower — the kind that stops you in your tracks, no matter how many times you have passed. These flank the entrance to our vegetable garden in two large pots. When I’m in the garden, I pass them a dozen times an hour. Each time, I trace over the petals and the delicately spotted leaves. Each time there’s something new to see: some new transparency or shadow in the sun, some new curl or frill, some funny little bee lolling around in the petals.

Most years, March is a fairly tame beast in our neck of the woods. Rainy and windy for sure, but we don’t normally have the whiplash weather that’s standard for our friends to the north. But this year was different.

Mid-March dropped seven inches of snow on our little farm overnight (after a 70-degree high the day before) — burying the daffodils that had just begun to bloom. Our husky loved it, of course. He spent most of the weekend outside burying himself in the snow drifts and running laps around the yard, terrorizing birds that swooped in for easy food from the hanging birdfeeder in the silver maple.

It’s been a cold week here on the farm — cold for us, anyway — reaching the low teens at night. The ground is icy and hard underfoot, even at midday.

The savoy cabbages, lacinato kale, and brussels sprouts that typically can stay out in our garden all winter, unprotected, have instead wilted and lie on the ground like some kind of heartbroken damsel collapsing onto a fainting couch. The purple sprouting broccoli, which stands about 24 inches tall and about 18 inches wide, still stands but looks pretty devastated: a child being forced to stand up when they really don’t want to.