If August can have its "dog days of summer" then the dog days of winter are certainly the middle of January. I can feel my energy starting to resurrect again with the coming garden season, but it becomes quickly tempered as abruptly as the New England weather changes.

It has been a strange winter thus far, starting off with plenty of cold weather in late fall and early winter, followed by successive weeks of above-normal temperatures and then back into the freezer. Who's to say what will follow in the next nine weeks of winter?

Regardless of the activity outdoors, right now is perhaps the only time of the year when you can plan your best garden ever.

What happens in July, August and September in terms of a successful harvest largely depends on the thought and planning efforts you tend to right now.

My gardening year begins in mid January, after the seed catalogs have been read and set aside. Careful note-taking has produced a dozen new varieties of vegetables that will find room in this year's garden, alongside the usual reliable varieties.

Several interesting flower selections that will also get a chance to prove themselves include a gorgeous purple Temari verbena.

In my early gardening days I would have simply gone out to the garden on Memorial Day weekend and started planting at will. No thought was given to succession crop planting, eventual plant heights and space requirements, crop rotation, early- and lateseason plantings, or simple

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considerations such as, was I planting too much or too little of a certain crop? It wasn't until later in the season that I'd realize that several costly mistakes were made as a direct result of poor planning. That is why planning on paper is essential for any garden to be successful and productive, because mistakes at this point are simply erased from paper. With a wellthought- out plan, even the amount of time it takes to get the garden planted in the spring will be reduced.

Using graph paper I can pinpoint the exact location of crops, down to the number of plants, while making sure to provide plenty of space for rows between them. All of this may sound a bit extreme, but by doing this I will know how many plants I need to raise (or purchase) to fill the beds.

Since crop rotation is an important part of keeping soilborne diseases in check, all I have to do is refer back to last year's plan. It is particularly important to avoid planting members of the cabbage family in the same location.

Something else to consider in the garden plan is sun exposure and plant maturity height. If a certain part receives more sunlight than another, it's important to plant crops accordingly. Chinese cabbage, lettuce, and other select leafy vegetables will tolerate some shade.

Other vegetables will eventually grow large and will shade out lesser plants. I make sure that crops such as corn, tomatoes, sunflowers and the large A-frame that supports the climbing cucumbers are towards the rear or northern side of the garden.

Where gardeners almost always miserably fail is allowing ample space for their crops to grow. It takes a strong heart to discard those leftover seedlings that we often find room to "squeeze" in somewhere. What ends up happening is that the garden becomes a jungle by July, with the overgrowth contributing to a host of insect and disease problems. In a worst-case scenario, the overcrowded garden even makes harvesting difficult or impossible, resulting in further losses.

I'm also careful to note which plants require garden spots where minimal disturbance will occur, from roto-tillers, weeding or other kinds of trampling.

Long-term crops like parsnips, leeks and celery will find such outof- the-way locations. Not only must the plan consider early spring and summer crops, but it must also take into consideration the second midsummer plantings for fall harvests.

Succession planting means that the garden soil is constantly working and hardly ever vacant.

As soon as one crop is finished, another one takes its place.

Some beds might even experience four or five successive crops during one season. Timing is important to make sure I have the right amount of seed or an ample supply of garden-ready transplants to fill in the vacancies as they occur.

Inter-planting of vegetables is included in the garden plan, yet one has to be careful here. It would make little sense to plant peas with a vegetable like carrots that need more time to mature. It is certainly easier to dig under an entire bed than to try to cultivate around a crop in the same row that is still growing.

Now that the plans for the year are in effect, at least on paper, the next step is the actual scheduling.

This is where the garden diary from previous years becomes an invaluable tool. Everything gets recorded in these journals from seed start dates, indoor transplant dates, the day plants are placed outside in the coldframe for hardening off - even the day they are moved into the garden.

The majority of the planting schedule focuses around the last expected frost date that I now cautiously consider as May 20.

Certainly experience has taught me to be flexible, but with this date in mind I can never really be too far off in my planting schedules.

As a further precaution against starting seeds too early or late, I will read the back of the seed packets just in case the seed companies have revised some of their seed germination and plant maturity dates.

Mail gardening questions to Bing J. Carbone, 46 Winthrop Woods Road, Shelton CT 06484, or e-mail him at bjcgardens@aol.com.