Our answers to the big questions of gardening—Why Garden? Can Everyone Garden? Which Kind of Gardener Am I? How Do I Want to Garden? Is There a Way to Garden That’s More Akin to My Values?—are our biggest tools we take with us into our gardens. And they’re the biggest gift we give ourselves.
Easy Companion Groupings to Get Started To make getting started with companion planting easier, here are three combinations of common vegetable garden plants listed in order of what they do well next to: COMPANION COMBINATION ONE Carrots Tomato & Onions Onions & Carrots Peppers Carrots (w/ early Radishes) Lettuce (w/ Read more…
Planting Times In terms of their preferred, and in some cases required, growing temperature, plants fall into two main groups: cool-season plants and warm-season plants. Cool-Season Because cool-season plants can take a light frost but get severely stressed and often bolt and go to seed when temperates get over 80 Read more…
Finding Your Last Frost Date To find your specific, local average last frost date in the spring, you can click on any of the links below. Each will take you to a page with resources to help you find yours. You can also just Google it. A Wonderful Map https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/last-spring-freeze Read more…
The Four Main Needs of All Garden Plants Plants’ Four Main Needs All plants everywhere have four main needs. They need a certain That’s it. Thrive In Correct Combination And each plant on earth thrives in a different combination of those four: And everything in between. So a certain… If Read more…
Gardening Can Be Easy Gardening Can Seem Hard Gardening can seem hard. I know. Every time I try to teach someone about a piece of it, I’m reminded how complicated it can be. It seems like there are a million variables, each with dozens of connected parts. Especially if you’re Read more…
Everyone Can Garden Many people think gardening isn’t for them. They just can’t do it. If you have the deep desire to garden, however, few things could be farther from the truth. In fact, everyone with that passion can learn to garden. That’s the biggest secret ingredient! The Usual Lot Read more…
Why Garden? “Why garden? What’s the point? A person can get everything cheaper and easier from the grocery store.” Yet there’s a pull to nurture our own plants in the soil that many of us would have a hard time describing. It Tastes Better If we tried, we’d first start Read more…
What Are Cover Crops? Cover crops are crops like wheat, oats, rye, forage radishes, clovers, and vetches that are grown to blanket, or cover, and protect the soil when the soil would otherwise be bare during the garden’s offseason, between widely spaced food crops, between temporal gaps in food crops. Read more…
Clearing Existing Vegetation for “No-Dig”/”No-Till” Beds Just like for tilling and digging methods, the first step in making a “no-dig” or “no-till” bed is to decide how you want to clear the area you intend as a bed of its existing vegetation. If the site has persistent weeds with strong Read more…
Deep Most gardeners add richness and organic matter with soil amendments and till them in, attempting to create ideal soil, but tillers only incorporate these amendments and loosen the soil about six-to-eight inches deep. Our garden plants, however, actually benefit greatly from our soil being improved and loosened much, much Read more…