One of the strategies I use and encourage other gardeners to use for getting the most out of their gardens each year is succession planting. This is the process of planting a new crop of something after the first one has a little bit of growth on it so that we can harvest pretty continuously or planting a second crop after a first one has given its all. This might make you think that you need to be buying new transplants or starting new seedlings all over again to get these succession...

Growing peppers is one of the most asked about topics at the farm stand and the most played episodes of this podcast. Most of the time the frustration comes with either not getting bell peppers to grow large enough or other problems for peppers, in general, including sunscald, lack of ripening, and just generally poor plant growth and low production levels. And, of course, there are the problems with pests and diseases. Today on Just Grow Something, we’re tackling all that and more. If...

I hear from a lot of frustrated would-be gardeners at the farmer’s market stand who say they just don’t have enough sun in their yard to be able to grow anything. Of course, they can always go to maximum effort by growing in smaller containers and moving them around the yard as the season progresses to catch the light as the sun shifts, which is a lot of work, but it’s also very possible that many of these potential gardeners have more sun than they think. And this goes for my gardeners who...

Foliar diseases in both vegetable and fruit plants can significantly impact our yield and the quality of that yield if left unmanaged. If you’ve ever had powdery mildew on your cucumbers or early blight in your tomatoes, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Even though the disease is affecting the leaves, the interruption of photosynthesis by the fungus affects the fruit development, and then the disease will jump from the leaves to the fruit and then we’ve got a real mess on our hands....

We talk a lot about growing vegetables on this show but, in truth, I am a huge fruit eater. I love fruit, either on it’s own or on a salad, in smoothies, in desserts, love it. Being someone who is a proponent of sustainable agriculture I also prefer to get my fruits locally if I can. That’s not to say I don’t always have bananas in this house and that I don’t love a good Mandarin orange, but if I can grow it myself, I feel much better. Fruit trees can be intimidating, and they can be...

Using the last frost date in spring or our average air temperatures might be a good guideline to start with when figuring out when to plant the garden, but a better method for knowing when it’s actually time to sow those seeds or transplant those plants is the soil temperature. Even though the air temperatures may be warmer than usual, the soil knows the truth. If that soil is cold and wet, or might be that way in the next ten days, your tomatoes, or peppers, or whatever, are not going to be...

Back in November I talked to you about doing a soil test, using slow-release amendments in the garden to do their work gradually over the winter, and then doing another soil test in the spring to see how well it worked. Now’s the time in most areas to be doing that spring soil test before you start planting your spring or summer gardens. But, what do you do if that spring test shows the amendments you added in the fall just weren’t enough to fix the problem? This time around you’ll need...

I had such a fantastic response to the March Question of the Month and we had such great conversations on Facebook and Instagram that I made this week’s entire episode all about! You came in clutch with problems and solutions and there was plenty of community discussion, which is what I love. Gardeners helping gardeners. We all have a lot of pests and some very clever ways to deal with them. And not all of them are insects. So, today on Just Grow Something we are talking all about your...

Hardening off is a process that helps plants adjust to the outdoor environment, preventing shock and ensuring they thrive once planted in the garden. Gradual exposure helps the plants acclimate to the conditions they will experience out in the garden or in their containers on your porch before you put them out there. Today on Just Grow Something we’ll go over the exact steps we need to take to harden off our plants prior to putting them out into the garden. This includes whether you’re...

Years ago I had some straw bales I’d used initially as fall décor that ended up in my chicken coop. The bales were used partially as a wind break all winter and partially as a roost. Well, chickens do what chickens do when they roost and by the spring of the following year those straw bales were full of nitrogen-rich chicken poop and starting to fall apart. So, I moved the out of the coop, watered the down really well for about a week, and planted a bunch of plants into them. This was my...

Today's episode is a special interview with Meg Lea of the Fox and Hound Garden in Wisconsin. Meg harvested an unbelievable amount of food from her Zone 4b gardens last year and donated over two thirds of it. We chat about all things gardening, from planning to production, donations and dollar roadside stands, overambitious plantings and failing forward. It's a great conversation with a fellow gardener that you'll love to listen in to. By the end you'll have commiserated and maybe have an...

If you’re planning to put in new fruit trees, bushes, or canes in your garden the best time of year, generally, is spring. We want the soil to warm up enough that the roots of the plants will begin to seek out water and nutrients as soon as placed in the ground with as little transplant shock as possible. But, if we have existing fruit trees, bushes, or canes then any maintenance on those trees should be done before the soil begins to really warm up and the plants come out of dormancy. This...

Potatoes are a cool season crop, and most varieties need between 60 and 120 days to mature, so that means getting them in the ground as soon as the soil can be worked and giving them the time they need to grow. The great thing about potatoes is they can be harvested at any size, so it’s a crop that can do well in a short-season area and can also be grown in places other than big, long in-ground rows. If you have minimal space or you can only garden in grow bags or buckets, you can still grow...

This month we’re talking a lot about seed starting and we can’t talk about starting seeds without talking about heat and light. Seeds sprout more quickly and efficiently when they’ve got the correct soil temperatures and the easiest way to do this is with a seedling heat mat. It’s not a requirement, though, so we’ll also talk about some ways you can up the ante on the soil temperatures during seed starting without a heat mat. Once those seeds do sprout and you're nurturing those little...

Seed starting does not need to be intimidating but it does come with a special set of requirements for true success. Two components to that success are the soils we use and the containers we choose. Not all soils and containers are created equal. Today we dig into the different types of seed starting mediums and containers available on the market and ones we can dig up in our own home. (Pun intended.) Ssurprise surprise, the potting soil you choose to use may not actually be soil at all. And...

If you’re planning to grow flowers alongside your vegetables this year, there may be some additional steps you’ll need to take when getting those started. Most annual flowers are started in ways very similar to our annual vegetable plants. But some flowers are trickier to start, especially perennials. And some can’t easily be started from seed and need to be propagated using other methods. Today on Just Grow Something we’re going to talk about the easiest flowers to start from seed and those...

Soil blocking is a seed starting technique that uses small blocks of soil or seed starting mix. There are no containers, no small plastic cells, just the soil itself. The benefit of soil blocking is, of course, you’re not keeping a bunch of plastic containers around to start your seeds in, but also there is no chance for the roots of the seedlings to become bound by a container. The plants roots will reach the edge of the soil block and simply stop growing until the block is planted, the...

As we start to get our garden plans in order for this year, succession planting is something that absolutely should be included in our calendars and our garden maps. It’s really the best way to ensure not only to do you have more to harvest throughout the season but that you take advantage of open spaces in the garden when one crop ends or the season changes. Today on Just Grow Something we’ll talk about what succession planting is, how it relates to interplanting and relay planting, and how...

There is a fine line in gardening between overcrowding the plants and making efficient use of space. If we do it right, the plants benefit from each other and we can get way more out of our garden than we ever dreamed. But if we step over that line, we end up with plants competing with each other for space, water, sunlight, and nutrients and our yield is dramatically reduced. As we start planning our gardens for the year it’s time to take a look at the space we have to work with and plan out...

You may have an idea of what you want to grow in terms of vegetables in your garden – say zucchini and tomatoes, for example. If you open the seed catalog or website to the page for zucchini you may find as many 18 to 25 different varieties to choose from, each with their own unique set of attributes in terms of shape, size, color, growing conditions, disease resistance, pollination type, and more. Move on to tomatoes, well now you’re talking hundreds of varieties in different classes from...

It used to be easy to just choose a catalog and order seeds because there were only a handful of choices and, generally speaking, unless you were going to the nursery or garden center to buy seed packets from a kiosk, you were ordering from a physical catalog that you actually got in the mail. But, nowadays, a simple internet search will yield thousands of results from companies all over the world and it’s a little bit more difficult to weed out the bad guys. So, today we are going to talk...

Let's revisit the most downloaded episode of this podcast the past three season: growing peppers! Peppers are one of those plants that I get asked about all the time; it’s also one of those vegetables that is a mainstay in many people’s kitchens, and they can be expensive at the grocery store, so knowing how to grow your own is high up on the gardening wish list for a lot of people. So, today we talk all about peppers, both sweet and hot, how to get them to germinate, their feeding...

Potatoes are a staple in many households. The wonderful thing about Irish potatoes is that they can be grown just about anywhere, in ground or in planters or buckets. They can be a quick shoulder-season crop or they can spend 120 days in the ground, making way for fall-planted crops when they’re done. You can pick them early for baby potatoes, leave them late for storage potatoes, or anything in between, and they are one of the easiest crops for beginners because they are pretty hands off....

Welcome back, my gardening friends, to another episode of Just Grow Something as we count down the top four episodes of all time throughout the month of December. This week we revisit the #3 most listened to episode of this show: Growing Onions. Onions are such a staple in most kitchens, it's no surprise many gardeners want to grow their own. The problem is they can be a bit tricky if you don't understand the difference in daylength requirements for growing those giant bulbs. Nutrient...