Outdoors: The secret to a beautiful garden all year round is meticulous planning.

The secret to a beautiful garden all year round is meticulous planning. So, rather than waiting for the cold spell to end before you brave your outside space, why not use this time to mull over what you want from your garden in 2010? Whether that involves learning from previous mistakes or trying something completely new, draw some inspiration from our experts.

Jenny Mollison, gardening columnist

There's never enough time for gardening so I'm starting with some planning, which will pay dividends. With my new camera, I am going to photograph the garden monthly to give me an idea of its good and bad points. The big project will be my first greenhouse. Driven by some recent horticultural failures when cucumbers came to nothing, courgettes were too late and tomatoes succumbed to blight, I intend to sow seeds earlier, without worrying that they will be killed off by a freak frost. On rainy days when I can't do any gardening, I intend to preserve my sanity by pottering in the greenhouse.

Neil Fishlock head of horticulture, Dobbies Garden Centres

This year I'm planning on planting more rhubarb, as my family love it. I will also chit my seed potatoes so I can get them in the ground as soon as the frost has passed. My sweet peas will be going in early too, as I'm growing them in the greenhouse ready to plant out once they are hardened off – that way I'll get the first flowers. And, as soon as the weather starts to become less frosty, I'll lightly prune my fruit trees to ensure that there'll be a harvest. At work, we've planned for a trend in customers looking for ready-made planted containers and are predicting that fruit trees will be popular. Gardeners are also very keen on violas, especially the scented ones for the spring.

Jo Whittingham, gardening writer

After a couple of years of trying to grow pretty much everything in my vegetable plot, I've resolved to keep things a lot simpler. Having attempted slightly ambitious successions of crops, where batches of seedlings end up horribly pot bound, waiting for a patch of spare soil, I'm now sure the way forward is to plan carefully and fight the urge to try too many weird and wonderful varieties. So this year there'll just be tomatoes in the greenhouse and a lot more of the trusty favourites, such as peas, beans, garlic, potatoes, parsnips and leeks outside. Why it's taken so long for me to work out that growing veg suited to Scotland works best I don't know, but I hope that this year I've finally cracked it.

Matthew Wilson author of Making a Garden (20, Quadrille) and The Landscape Agency's associate director of design

My wife and I have nine-month-old twins, so this year I'm determined to do as much as possible in the garden with them. I've got a couple of large zinc containers that I'm going to sow with salads and herbs, so that by next summer, when they're old enough to start eating solids, they'll be ready. And I've bought two big pots to grow sunflowers in. I'm determined that Dylan and Amelie will be involved in sowing them, even if that means they'll just be using a pudgy finger to make a seed hole!

Antoinette Galbraith, gardening writer

I plan to plant more bulbs to ensure a succession of colour and interest in the dark days of winter and to boost my herbaceous planting scheme towards the end of the summer. Early bulbs will include one or two early flowering specialist snowdrops that I plan to purchase on a visit to Cambo Estate in Fife (www.camboestate.com). These will be followed by purple and white crocus tommasinianus planted in a swathe in the lawn, where they can be seen from the kitchen window, as well as some early flowering narcissi. In the late summer, I hope that my late summer flowering bulbs will include plenty of scented lilies, some of which will be grown in pots for use in the house. For the first time in many years I'll also plant clumps of white, purple tinged gladiolus callianthus.

Jean Bareham, garden tour guide (www.greenyondertours.com)

Doing garden tours can be humbling, so my 2010 resolution for my own plot is for productivity over beauty. My garden is a corner of an Edinburgh back green, reclaimed from rank weeds. But the soil is good, so in 2010 I hope to become self-sufficient by growing hearty vegetables. I'll try to resist choosing aubergines and borlotti beans (last year I managed to nurture half a portion of each) and will stick to tatties and broad beans instead – lots of them. At least the weather in the early part of this year will have killed off a few slugs!

• This article was first published in The Scotsman on 23 January, 2010