Planting Winter Crops

I'm running out of creative juices for Sherlock Holmes. I haven't read Doyle in ages, and the unfortunate fact of the BBC series being postponed doesn't help.

Pictured: the best recent adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. That includes Downey Jr..

With that in mind, I'm going to move away from the pastiches and just focus on the salient points.

Source Used: A

Three most Interesting Points:

1. The first thing I noticed was, man, this stuff really takes planning. I'm especially struck by that due to, uh, tendencies to procrastinate. And the thought you should be planning ahead so many months and sometimes even years in order to make sure that you're not sucking the soil dry or planting too late or putting things in a bad position is a bit of a wake-up call. It's always said that nothing worth having is easy; in the same way, I guess nothing worth sticking with can be done on the fly or as an afterthought.
2. Vegetables (and especially root vegetables) can get sweeter when cold? I never knew that! What drives that increase in cellulose or starch or whatever carbohydrate they store? More importantly for my future salads, I wonder if that applies to when they're not alive?
3. I've always wondered what good flimsy little plastic coverings could do for plants. Apparently, it can add "up to" 5 degrees centigrade to plants. I had no idea that that was a lot!

Question: Aside from gardening, I've also got a fledgling interest in cooking. Unfortunately, I tend to work more with Asian vegetables/spices/herbs, mostly because that's what my mother has in stock, but looking through the list of vegetables that could be harvested around the same time is quite interesting, and raises the question of whether or not tastes for food will vary in different regions according to what mixtures of crops are available. Obviously, what with the ability to import and export foods from all over the world, the difference between winter or spring or summer or fall crops is blurred, but what of those in the times when people still ate foods that were in season? Would people from certain regions have preferences for certain combinations of foods and flavourings?

To Look For: Maybe not in any particular garden, but gardens in general: what sort of coverings and vegetables do people have? What seems to be the cheapest/most common/easiest ... etc.