For most of the US this cold blast will be the last and it will be time to start getting our hands dirty. I have a 12 acre farm that fully supports my family and leaves plenty left over for storage and the future. While I'm biased a bit, I think it's time to bring back victory gardens.
Get out there, dig in the dirt, and plant some seeds.
Feel free to ask advice here!
I started doing this about 12 years ago, but my vegetable garden has become less productive each year. I think part of the problem has been my failure to supplement the soil with manure or whatever good stuff, but also bad weather that varies from too wet to drought and back, and now there's too much shade over that area. I'm going to try to relocate it this year to where I currently have a patch of grass, not sure how much prepping of the soil I need to do.
Do you compost?
I have a compost pile of mostly leaves, tilled them in a couple years ago. One year I tilled in bags of rotted manure, but neither of those made much difference.
You are removing all the nutrients from your soil by gardening. If you don't add nutrients back in things will not grow. Leaves have very few nutrients. The manure probably helped with some nutrients, but not all.
I'd recommend you invest some time learning how to compost(it's easy and free). In the meantime use miracle grow.