There's nothing like the first day of planting. It signals the end of another long winter, regardless of the onion snows that will follow.

My first planting occurred on St. Patrick's Day, the traditional start to the season in the vegetable garden.

I was happily outside on my hands and knees pushing onion sets into the dark cool soil listening to the red-bellied woodpecker screeching as it flew from tree to tree. It doesn't get much better than that for a gardener, the smell of the soil and the feel of the cool dirt on my fingertips.

Every year it's a crapshoot to see if the soil is ready to be worked. This season the planets aligned, and my garden was sowed with peas, lettuce, spinach and Swiss chard along with those purple onion sets.

These crops not only survive the frigid temperatures of spring, but also they thrive in cool weather.

The advantage to planting lettuce and spinach now is that it will continue to put on tender leafy growth before temperatures get hot. Spinach is notorious for bolting or going to seed as soon as the weather gets hot. The leaves become bitter and inedible.

The next crop to go to seed usually is lettuce. Often gardeners will sow a crop of lettuce every few weeks to continue the harvest all season.

Conventional spinach can be grown only in the early spring and the fall. My favorite substitute for spring spinach is Malabar spinach. It's not a spinach at all; it's tropical and grows like a vine. When conventional spinach goes to seed, that's when I plant Malabar spinach. It loves hot weather, and the heart-shaped leaves on 8-foot vines taste just like spinach. The plant produces until frost.

If you haven't gotten out to the garden yet, no worries. You can start planting well into April. The key to planting early is either having soil prepared the fall before, having a garden with rich loam that will dry out as winter recedes or piling on the compost.

I'm always preaching to gardeners that if the dirt sticks to the shovel, it's too wet to work. One of the worst things to do is turn the soil over when it's too moist. It ruins the soil structure for the season, leaving big clumps that dry like concrete.

One way to start early is to use the technique I applied to my garden in the fall -- but you can still do it now. I just dumped lots of compost on top of the raised beds. Then the beds were raked flat and mulched with straw to keep the soil amendment in place.

On March 17 I removed the straw and covered the beds with seed by scattering them on top of the beds without turning the soil over. The seeds were raked in, then tamped down. I prefer this method to rows; the seeds are sown thickly and then thinned a bit as they grow. The thinnings are a spring treat for the gardener whose fingers are numb while working in the damp soil. Lettuce forms a quick carpet even after being thinned, but crops like radishes need plenty of room to form good-sized roots.

An important part of gardening this time of the year for me is keeping records and writing down ideas for next season. I've kept a garden journal for nearly 25 years, and it helps keep me organized.

It's also a great time to see where spring blooming bulbs are needed. I fill the journal with lots of notes and drawings to help me remember garden epiphanies that occur while staring at puffy white clouds during frequent breaks from garden chores.

Planting early extends our season and takes advantage of plants that enjoy spring weather. As long as the soil is ready for the seed, plant something that loves cool weather. You'll be harvesting before most people even have their garden turned over.