If you’ve ever thought: I don’t have enough time I don’t have enough space I don’t know enough I tried before and it didn’t work You’re not alone. These are the exact reasons most people give when they want to grow vegetables — but haven’t quite started or they stopped after a season or two….
Why You Should Stop Pulling Up Vegetable Plants (and What to Do Instead)
There is one garden habit I only started using fairly recently. For years, I thought pulling plants out by the roots was the right way to clean up my vegetable garden. A neat, empty bed felt productive — like I was finishing the season properly. But what I didn’t realize was that in trying to…
Why Your First Frost Date Matters More than Your Garden Zone
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I talk a lot about timing in the garden.Not zones… not charts… not what your neighbor is planting.Just timing. And it all starts with one thing: Your frost dates. Most gardeners focus so much on their USDA zone that they forget it tells you nothing about…
Goodbye Tiller, Hello Raised Beds!
For years, every spring started the same way.I’d drag out the old tiller, spend hours wrestling it through our heavy clay soil, and then spend the rest of the season pulling weeds that seemed to grow faster than my vegetables. Then one day I finally discovered the secret to growing a successful, low-maintenance garden: raised…
Using Cover Crops in Small Gardens and Raised Beds
As a home gardener, you may not have thought much about cover crops—or maybe you’ve assumed they’re only for farmers with big fields of corn or wheat. The truth is that cover crops can be just as useful in a small backyard garden and raised beds as they are on a farm. Whether you grow…