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The wait for spring is hard! If you're wondering how you can best use your time in the winter to prepare for the next year of homesteading, here are seven winter projects you can tackle. Some of them might already be on your radar, but others might have slipped by, ready to rear their persistent heads later in the year when you don't have time to take them on. (Don't want to read all the words? This blog post is also a podcast—just press the triangle play button on the little black bar at the top of this post!) 1. Looking for winter projects? Clean up, clean up, everybody, everywhere! If you're always working from behind, you will never get ahead. And you know it's going to be harder to get ahead inside the house when the weather warms up and you're working your tail off outside the house. I'm not talking about scrubbing the toilet or doing laundry. I'm referring to things that aren't on our everyday cleaning to-do list, but we'd greatly benefit from getting done. You can, for instance: go through your junk drawer, repair ripped bedding, go on a missing sock hunt, do a paper purge, reduce your stash of cardboard boxes, organize your fabric/yarn stash match up food storage tops and bottoms, rearrange what's stored beneath the kitchen sink, what other ideas do you have? Any little projects you've been walking by thinking, I'll get to it later, work really well as winter projects. Whether it's pulling out a tote of clothes you have stashed for your kids and seeing if they've grown enough to fit into them yet, or changing out that shower curtain that has the giant rip in it, winter means you've got time to get things done! 2. Inventory, bake, process, and menu plan Do you know what's in your freezer? Have you looked at the shelves in your pantry to know what you have, what you need, and what should really be used in the very near future? Winter is the perfect time to figure out that information. Bonus—you can then use that information to make a menu plan that will help you to most effectively and efficiently use what you already have in your freezer and on your shelves. Looking for more winter projects for the kitchen? Winter is also a great time to catch up on some baking. If you have room in your freezer and aren't planning on butchering soon, why not bake a few batches of bread? Bread freezes well, and it's always nice to have an extra loaf of home baked goodness that you can pull out of the freezer when you don't have time to bake it fresh. Did you stick some tomatoes in the freezer when you couldn't keep up with how fast your garden was providing them to you?  (Jess from The 104 Homestead has a great trick for this!) Now is the perfect time to pull those tomatoes out and can some salsa or spaghetti sauce—the processing will also add humidity and heat to your house. 3. Order seeds, plan your garden The seed catalogs arrive and homestead gardeners all breathe a collective sigh of satisfaction. This has to be one of our favorite winter projects, right? Look through those catalogs and order your seeds—don't forget this part! It's fun to look and dream, but if you wait too long to order those seeds that you're dreaming about, you run the risk of trying to order something the company has already run out of. Make a plan for where those seeds are going to go in your garden, and while you're at it, figure out what you still need. If you're not starting seeds, you may still need to buy pepper or tomato plants. Did you not have luck with the tomato cages you had last year? Do you need to replace one of your hoses? Were you going to try out some new gardening gloves? Thinking of attempting black plastic mulch? Will your garden be bigger? Smaller? Do you need a second one? Do you need to move the one you have? These are all things to use the free-time of winter to figure out so you can have a good plan of attack for the busy time of spring. 4.