Just Grow Something | The "Why" Behind the "How" of Gardening

As we start to wind down the summer gardening season it’s a great time to be adding compost to your beds to help give the soil a boost. Letting the compost break down over the winter gives it adequate time to become activated with all the little microorganisms that are so important for delivering nutrients to our plants in the soil.

But, purchasing compost, especially really good compost, can be pricey and the bigger your garden, the higher the price tag! It’s hard to justify sometimes because some of us are growing our own gardens so we can save money on our food budget, not pay more to amend the soil than it would cost us to just buy our veggies at the grocery store. And if we opt for budget compost we may find not only is the texture and quality definitely fit the price point, but our plants aren’t getting much out of that soil the following season which is a complete waste of money.

I also understand that not everybody has room for a big compost pile in their yard, you may not even have a yard and are gardening in containers on a patio or porch, but you still want the best amendments for your soil and everybody has kitchen waste that can be used to feed our garden soil.

So, today on Just Grow Something we’re going to talk about the absolute easiest and least messy ways to build a small compost pile or composting system for your garden regardless of where you are. It may not be everything you need to add to your garden, depending on the size you’re working with, but it will absolutely reduce the need for having to purchase as much and you’ll be diverting waste from the landfill and helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process. Let’s dig in.

References and Resources:

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Bonus content for supporters of the Podcast! (buymeacoffee.com)

Ep. 106 - Introduction to Vermicomposting (Worm Farming!)

Ep. 107 - Worm Farming with Lauren Cain of Elm Dirt

As the fall season is practically upon us and the pumpkin spice gods are already blessing us with their bounty, it’s time to get your garden ready for the changing weather. Fall gardening can look very different depending on your climate, but no matter where you live, the changing season means there are some important tasks to attend to for the success of your garden now and into the spring.

Today on Just Grow Something we’re tackling your fall garden checklist. Whether you’re buttoning up your garden for winter, transitioning into a cool-season planting cycle, or continuing to harvest year-round, today’s episode breaks down fall gardening tasks for three different groups of gardeners: Zones 3 and 4, Zones 5 through 9, and Zones 10 and 11. Let’s dig in!

Question of the Month: What was your biggest success in the garden this season?

References and Resources:

Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group

Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon

Bonus content for supporters of the Just Grow Something Podcast! (buymeacoffee.com)

Getting Started with Cover Crops - Ep. 166

2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map | USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

Frost Dates: First and last frost dates by zipcode - Garden.org

Last week on the podcast we talked about which seeds we should be saving from the garden, how mature the fruits need to be when we harvest seeds and a bit about how to dry and test them. This week, we’re focusing on storing them properly.

When we get seeds from a catalog or other seed supplier, they’ve often gone through a set of steps that we may not be duplicating at home with our own saved seeds. Seed suppliers are required to test their seeds not just for germination percentage, but also for diseases and moisture content. These tests ensure that we’re not brining outside diseases into our gardens and make sure the seeds we get will maintain their integrity in storage without spoiling.

Today on Just Grow Something we’re going to talk about how we can achieve the same results in our own seed collection. If you garden where certain diseases are prevalent you certainly don’t want to saving that disease to plant again with your seeds the next year. We also want to be sure our seeds remain intact in storage and we don’t open up a fuzzy, moldy mess when it’s time to plant in the spring. Let’s dig in!

Question of the Month: What was your biggest success in the garden this season?

References and Resources:

Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon

Just Grow Something is Bonus content for supporters of the Just Grow Something Podcast! (buymeacoffee.com)

Vegetable: Hot Water Seed Treatment | Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment at UMass Amherst

Saving seeds from our gardens to use the next spring it is a great way to not only help our budget out a little bit but also to give ourselves some food security and doesn’t sound like it should be a very difficult task. At that point we’re not relying on someone else to grow our seeds for us that we have to buy over and over again. Just collect the seeds from whatever you want to keep, rinse them, dry them, and pack them away for next year, right?

Well, yes, but also, no. The method I just described can absolutely mean you’ll have beautifully preserved seeds that have fantastic germination the next season and yield a bounty of exactly what you thought you were planting. But it’s equally possible that you’ll open the seed packet the next season to find fuzzy gray fungus or black moldy growth on your seeds, or seeds that don’t sprout properly, or maybe they sprout and you get midway through the gardening season and the fruit on the plant look nothing like the ones you saved the seeds from.

So, today on Just Grow Something we’re going to dig into which plants you should and shouldn’t be saving seeds from, how to properly collect, clean, and dry those seeds in order to best guarantee your success the next season, and how to quickly test them before you store them to know if they’re viable. Let’s dig in!

References and Resources:

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Hot Water Treatment for Seeds – Louisiana State University

How To Save Vegetable Seeds – Farmers Almanac

If you have intentions of growing garlic for next year, now is the time to be ordering your seed garlic. Garlic needs about six months in the ground to get to maturity so, here in the northern hemisphere, we may be planting our garlic as early as mid-September in some areas.

With the plethora of catalogs and websites and garden centers offering garlic to gardeners, how do you know what variety of garlic to choose? And should you be choosing hard neck, or soft neck, or that look-a-like Elephant garlic?

Today on Just Grow Something we’re gonna' figure it out. We’ll talk about the differences between the types of garlic, and what might make you want to choose one variety over another – whether it’s to do with flavor, storage, disease resistance, or something else entirely. Let’s dig in!

References and Resources:

Just Grow Something | creating a podcast and gardening videos | Patreon

Just Grow Something is Bonus content for supporters of the Just Grow Something Podcast! (buymeacoffee.com)

How many types of garlic are there? - Chef's Resource (chefsresource.com)

Explore Cornell - Home Gardening - Vegetable Growing Guides - Growing Guide

Garlic Variety Descriptions | The Dyer Family Organic Farm

Garlic | The Buffalo Seed Company

If you didn’t plan for a fall garden and maybe have changed your mind a little bit and want to give it a go, you might be looking for something you can very quickly put into the ground and grow directly from seed. Enter beets. They will happily germinate in almost any temperature of soil and they greatly appreciate the cooler days of fall when they are coming to maturity. They’re not fool-proof, because there is a little effort needed in terms of thinning in most cases and they do need a nice, loose soil to produce those beautiful round roots, but there is nothing that beats the flavor in the fall of a sweet, roasted beet alongside other root vegetables. Or, my go-to snack or addition to my salads, pickled beets, and my new favorite, beets roasted in air fryer. Even my husband admits those are good and he swears beets taste like dirt.

So, today on Just Grow Something we’re talking beets! How to grow them, what type to grow for your area, and why does it seem that even when we carefully space our beet seeds out in the garden that we end up having to thin them anyway? So many seedlings! Let’s dig in!

References and Resources:

Explore Cornell - Home Gardening - Vegetable Growing Guides - Growing Guide

⁠Garden Insect Netting⁠ (affiliate)

⁠Garden Frost Cloth/Row Cover⁠ (affiliate)

I do searches online for gardening topics all the time. I will search key phrases to see if I can come up with topics that people seem to be searching for or gardening questions that may be trending. I even search specific ideas to see if there is new information or research that I’m not aware of. And more and more frequently I’m noticing a disturbing trend.

As I look at the search results, often times I will see multiple pages in a row, usually sponsored results, that have the exact same key phrases as the meta description, the little blurb you see under the link that tells you what’s on the page before you click it. When I click on one of those pages I find the page to be full of ads, with very little substance in terms of gardening know how. And the verbiage and style of writing is very mechanical, disjointed, and generic. If I click another one, the page layout is exactly the same and so is the wording.

Today on Just Grow Something we’re diving into AI and gardening advice. Can AI be helpful when asking questions in the garden? Are those answers accurate? And how can we determine whether a source is reliable or not? Let’s dig in.

References and Resources

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Just Grow Something Website (justgrowsomethingpodcast.com)

There is something very satisfying about growing your own food, for sure, and being able to walk out into the garden to pick your lunch or your dinner. But, in the dead of a Midwest winter, the ability to be able to “shop” your own pantry for the things you eat the most, that you grew, that is a whole other level.

So, today on Just Grow Something we’re going to talk about the basic necessities you need for starting your own canning adventure. We’ll mostly focus on boiling-water canning and what can be safely canned in that manner, but since I jumped head first into pressure canning just a year after I started water-bath canning, we’ll touch on some of the differences in case, you too, are big on confidence but maybe a little shy on knowledge. Let’s dig in!

References and Resources

Over the past decade or so there has been much debate about whether open-pollinated and heirloom varieties should be the preferred choice for gardeners over hybrids. And there's been even louder discussion (arguments) over GMOs or genetically engineered plants. Why all the fuss?

We're getting a bit sciencey today. I mean, more than usual. We're discussing the difference between all these types of plants, when and how they are appropriate to use in our home gardens, and what, if any, implications genetic engineering has on our choice of food at the grocery store and the farm stand.

Let’s dig in!

References and Resources:

Vote for me in the Women in Podcasting Awards!

Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group

Save on a Magic Mind Subscription with code justgrowsomething20

Hybrid or Open Pollinated - Garden.org

https://entomology.ca.uky.edu/files/ef130.pdf

Choosing Bt Sweet Corn Varieties | University of Maryland Extension (umd.edu)

The True Story of Golden Rice, the Genetically Modified Superfood That Almost Saved Millions (foreignpolicy.com)

Transgenic Virus-Resistant Papaya: The Hawaiian 'Rainbow' was Rapidly Adopted by Farmers and is of Major Importance in Hawaii Today (apsnet.org)

Pinkglow® pineapple (pinkglowpineapple.com)

In Search of the Real Jersey Tomato (Part I) (Archived)

Rutgers 250 Tomato | Rutgers Research

Mother Nature has opened the blast furnace door on west central Missouri. I recorded this quick episode on the fly in the gardens to share with you a little wisdom about what our plants are doing in the heat and how to avoid further damage to things like tomatoes by overwatering. Let's dig in!

You can find the video version of this podcast on Spotify and YouTube!