Get your garden off to a winning start by including a few All-America Selections winners in this year’s garden.

Make this the year you finally start and keep a gardening journal. Keeping records of your successes, failures, pest problems and weather will help you grow a healthy, beautiful and productive garden in a more eco-friendly manner.

Your mailbox and dining room table are overflowing with catalogs filled with pictures of beautiful flowers and scrumptious vegetables. With so many choices it can be a bit overwhelming – I can help.

So you decided to brighten the winter landscape with a few lights.

Walk off some of those holiday calories and gather ideas for your garden. Look for trees and shrubs that provide interesting form, bark and texture in the winter.

X may not mark the spot in the garden – but bulbs, plant markers or standing stems sure can help guide your cleanup efforts next spring.

Balloon flower, butterfly weed and swamp mallow are a few of the plants that emerge late in the spring. This makes it easy to accidently weed them out during spring clean-up.

Mums are often the last flash of color in the garden. But getting them to survive the winter can be difficult.

Now is a good time to make sure your garden provides a colorful finale to the growing season.