Volunteer squash, melon, and gourds

Bonus surprises from soil experiments By Janis Norton. – What happens when you experiment in your yard? For me and my Two Peace in a Pod Urban Farm, it is an amazing bonus crop of pumpkins, squash, watermelons, sunflowers, and onions! For last several seasons, I have not been ready to do any serious new garden work since I was busy with work, and as a result…

Raymond Jess Grow Buckets: basket in bottom

Grow Buckets

Several years ago, I started my adventure with wicking garden beds. I found the concept powerful and wondered, how can I use this concept in a different way? I consulted the internet and found a few good ideas, but not quite what I wanted. I needed something I thought might stand up to the unrelenting summer heat of Phoenix, Arizona and produce a nice vegetable harvest. I came up with this design of a grow bucket.

Tack strip on greenhouse

The Six Week Greenhouse

By Guest Blogger: Joel Karsten – For northern gardeners, starting vegetable plants as early as possible is key to a productive and successful food garden, since sometimes it seems we only have about a three-week growing season! That might be a slight exaggeration, but certainly gardening in the north is challenging. One of the key advantages of the Straw Bale Gardening method is…

Garden eating culprit

What’s Eating My Garden?? An Epic Adventure with a Twist at the End!

By Guest Bloggers: Jim & Roxanne Malinski – We live in southeast Chandler, AZ in a neighborhood established 20 years ago.  Last year in mid-September (2018) we planted romaine lettuce, curly kale, rainbow blend carrots (all seed) and six small broccoli plants in my vegetable garden (raised 6’x12’ plot).  Within a couple weeks everything was…

Love Languages of Gardening

Love Languages of Gardening

By Guest Blogger: Katie Fiore – When you love to garden, it’s not always easy to explain why you love it. Often, we make a joke about how we like to play in the dirt. And that’s a legit reason! There’s scientific proof that playing in the dirt exposes you to soil microbes that stimulate your body to produce serotonin. Other times, we excitedly start talking about…