While your garden is sitting around waiting for the next growing season to begin, put it to work for you. Start thinking about amending your soil in the winter months so you'll have great soil for your seedlings come spring. There are a couple of ways to go about adding organic nutrition to your garden bed.

The first way is to simply gather all the dry leaves you can find and pile them onto the garden bed. Sprinkle some soil, compost, or grass clippings on top of them to hold them in place.

The top layer will also add some nitrogen or microbes which encourage the leaves to break down into what we call leaf mold. Leaf mold gives average garden soil a wonderfully, crumbly structure called "tilth". Good tilth makes soil hold water longer, allows good drainage, makes it easy for roots to penetrate the earth, and makes weed pulling a simple affair.

Another technique is to look for compostable organic matter around your yard and home to toss into the garden bed. Materials to look for are things such as:

• Straw or hay (rotting is even better)
• Rabbit manure
• Bedding (and manure) from small caged animals
• Spent vegetable crops
• Dry leaves
• Grass clippings
• Weeds (seedless)
• Newspaper
• Discarded rabbit feed (pellets)
• Vegetable peelings from the kitchen