Our cold climate may nip at the heels a bit, and make all manner of merry hell with the plumbing, and heating, and sense of humor systems that keep us alive and sane over the months that would happily kill us; but it also gives gardeners an armor-clad, spouse-deflecting reason to call it quits and get to guilt-free terms with an armchair and a seed catalog. It’s just too damned cold out there.

Yes, but no.

Here’s five reasons why you might want to set the catalogs next to the bed instead of the armchair, wrap up warm, and add some outside tasks to your winter daytime routine – even if it looks like nighttime mostathetime out there.

Health - Movement is critical to good health, and most of us don’t get enough of it – or Vitamin D – during the warm season, much less the colder season. Letting your joints seize up and your muscles atrophy over what amounts to at least five months of hibernation, will not only contribute to other health conditions, but make it harder to get back into the swing of things when the daffodils start blooming and everything kicks off.

Self-Defense - If you’re a gardener-gardener and not simply a consumer-gardener, you know that the garden is made up of more than hydrangeas and easy solutions. It’s also fueled by a relentless growing season that thinks up five tasks for every one you accomplish.

Taking care of many of these tasks in the colder months when the landscape can’t fight back is crucial to staying on top of the workload in the growing season. Pruning, brush and vine clearing, and the beheading of annual cool-season weeds are three of the biggest bang-for-buck jobs you can do over the next few months.

Organization - Who on earth has time to sort pots, sort seeds, sort tools, etc… during planting and panting season, aside from the over-achievers we all secretly dislike? Now is the time to Marie Kondo your outside world.

Whether it’s the little tool box and stack of pots you have sitting on your balcony, or the full-on nightmare that awaits you in the garage, putting your garden house in order helps you breathe when there is not a breath to be had in spring.

Skill Building - Learning how to be a winter gardener with a winter garden is something easily dismissible by those who don’t do it. I know, I was one of them for a long time. It’s far easier to say "I don’t do a winter garden," than to look outside and see twenty pathetic TLte-B-tLte daffodils poking their heads above an arctic tundra and making the entire scene more pitiable than it already is.

Yet, the winter garden is a completely different animal to the spring or summer garden, and should be designed to exemplify the moments of exquisite beauty present in the colder months, not to re-create something that cannot be re-created.

Creating a striking framework that supports those poor early bulbs with colorful bark, evergreen foliage and the frosted beauty of the previous season, is an enormous skill and one that continually builds upon the successes of the previous year. It takes time, trial and error, and new ways of thinking about garden design to accomplish it, but it makes you a better gardener generally.

With thought and effort, those twenty doleful and disembodied TLte-B-tLtes become two hundred little flames interspersed with the fresh blossoms of hellebores under a canopy of red winterberries. And one year, standing with flushed, rosy cheeks and a broad smile across your face, you have a rapturous moment where you realize you’ve broken the back of it.

And then it’s game on.

Connection - Modern life is a life characterized by disconnection. We mark our seasons by Hallmark holidays and rarely come face to face with how our food was sowed, grown, stored, distributed, sold -- and increasingly -- cooked. A thermostat sorts out our heat, a tap provides water. We buy lilies in December, eat apples in June, and power plants keep the lights on and phones in hands until the wee small hours. Who needs valerian root when you’ve got Unisom?

And yet we are a species that has spent the great majority of our evolutionary process deeply immersed in, and affected by, the rhythm of the planet’s heartbeat.

Though we might not recognize it, the loss of connection to, and responsibility for, our basic needs and the needs of our community makes us consumers chasing money for commodities, not producers creating those commodities. This has the subtle effect of making us feel less in control of our own destinies – less purposeful.

In this place, winter is a wasteland – something to be painfully endured on those cold mornings ‘twixt car and front door. But when we use those months to tend, to move, to grow, to produce, and above all, to observe, we can endure it with purpose – gently reconnected in a small, but substantive way to the Earth and her seasons.

All that blather to say: Get out there. You’ll be happier. You’ll feel better. And before you are ready for it, spring will appear and greet you like an old friend, not a new one.