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I certainly aim to have a garden where I can get the most out of it possible for the least amount of work. I have a pretty big garden and I love gardening but I also have a job and a busy life so I like to set my garden up and I’m getting a lot of joy and a lot of food from it and not feeling like it’s taking over my life and I have to spend every single day in my garden.

I talk about how to help people set themselves up with less of the things we don’t like, like weeds and pests, and mistakes and other stressors and more of the things we love the beauty and food and the good insects and the things that bring us back to the garden year after year.

Excellent. I know you have a great Facebook community where people can learn more and I’ve lots of guests talk about how  much they have learned from you and your books and community.

Reflecting on Last Year’s Garden

I do start the book out with a little bit of reflection. I think it’s valuable to just pause a little bit and think about the previous season year before you start planning for this upcoming season. There’s lots of worksheets so it’s all about the reader. I can’t fgirue out what your goals are so it’s all about you figuring out your own personalized garden

• What were your successes?
• What do you wish you did a little bit better

no matter how you are gardening

New Experiments

There are  things you always want to do differently. One of the most fun things about gardening is it’s cyclical you get a new year fresh slate each year… try new experiments … some work out and some don’t … cathartic a little bit… you can forgive yourself and …. things you didn’t want to do … releasing it all and spring is a fresh start … repeat the successes

When thinking about your garden and life vision for the year…. what kind of lifestyle do you want gardening to create for you this year… for a lot of us when you get into gardening it’s more then just a hobby and past time, it bleeds into your whole life and becomes like a lifestyle… stepping back and looking at your life holistically and thinking about about what role you want gardening to play.

What do you want to grow!

Thinking Strategically

I encourage people to think a little more strategically, I have a pretty big garden and even I don’t have room to grow everything I want to grow

So I encourage people to look at

• their eating habits
• grocery store cooking habits
• what would you eat more of  it it was less expensive

What are some of the the meals that you cook the most, what ingredients could you potentially grow for yourself, so  say you cook a lot of pasta with tomato sauce… maybe one of your priorities would be to grow tomatoes and grow enough to freeze sauce for enough for pasta dishes all season long

How to get the most bang for your book, what do you buy from the grocery store, what’s most expensive?

• what would you eat more of  it it was less expensive

Blueberries is my favor ingredient to my smoothies. This year they are really expensive, this time of year, I wouldn’t buy them for my smoothy, but I go and pick and  I don’t even grow them, I picked like 25 lbs last summer and froze them all and so I’m eating them all year round… hopefully they will last till July!

So I encourage people to think about

• what you want to grow…
• why you want to grow it…

I love all of that and how you are tying it in to your lifestyle and what do you want it to look like… I’m gonna turn 50 this year,  because I’m really focusing on my health and eating, I tried the Food Babe’s sugar detox and now I’m back to struggling again with the whole sugar eating balance… but I am super stoked and get eat healthy, thinking about planning my garden and planning what’s gonna grow in it this year. Thinking about what you are shopping for, what are you excited about next year I definitely have some of those ideas…. where should we go next, do you want to talk about something your excited about next year?

Adding Flowers for Color

So one of the things I’m excited about doing in my garden…

I always order a lot of flowers, to compliment my vegetable garden… I mix a lot of flowers. I have a very visible vegetable garden, it’s in my front yard, side yard, I live on a corner… There’s lots of walkers, lots of dog walkers, and bikers and  lots of my neighbors come by, I try to make my garden really beautiful as much as productive…

So I try to think of more ways to mix in flowers, mostly annuals … I always plant flowers on the ends of my beds, I’ll sprinkle flowers seeds, I’ll save a little bit at one end and pop in some flowers…  mix different colors and textures…

I planted a a whole bed of peppers, then I planted a row of flowers kind of the short way along the bed, then I planted  second half of peppers and so i broke up this whole long bed of peppers, even though I think peppers are beautiful. so it just put a pop of color in the middle of that bed

I like to experiment…

Last year I planted a row of salvia along with my how they go with my Lacinato Kale has a blueish gray tint to it, so I I treat vegetable gardening, like my perennial garden

what vegetables I can plant next to each other, wll set each other off and how can I mix flowers and vegetables together.

I relaly like the design part, and form and how thing go to gether. 

I take a lot of photos, most of the photos in my book are taken by me in my garden so that’s part of my motivation

how can I set up these really pretty scenes and details and how can I capture them for my website and my blog! 

I think at this time of year, I live in Madison WI, it’s really gray and everything’s dead and most of the snow’s melted and this is when I think about how much I miss my vegetable garden and how much joy it brings to my life and aesthetically I walk to and from my house and I realize that that color and life adds such a layer of joy to my life throughout  the season…. I can’t wait spring! When that all comes back, the texture and insects and colors etc…

People might be surprised about that and thinking about putting flowers and vegetables together. Where do you get your annuals, do you grow them from seeds or get starts?

Where do you get your annuals

I have a little section about growing flowers for beauty, my five favorite annuals for the vegetable garden. 

I grow some of the easy ones:

• zinnias
• salvia
• celosia
• rudbeckias

I have a nursery that I like not too far form my house, I always go there every year, I have actually discovered a lot of my favorite flowers from them… they have arelly good annuals, sometimes I’ll buy a flat of mixed annuals

less expensive way because I don’t have to commit to a whole seed packet …

Last year I bought some globe amaranth, some can be short but these were tall, and I planted them in area, they almost looks like a tight little pompom and they are the ones I planted with my peppers…

I usually grow a red one I saw they had an electric purple I think that’s a keeper, maybe I’ll grow, I think I did order the seeds, for 2-3 $ try a new annual then if you like it you can integrate your seed starting….

I kind of do a mix, I run out of room often for seed starting…

That sounds pretty and like a lot of fun! Am I right that they are good for bees and beneficial insects too? 

There’s also amaranth, it get’s the big feathery flower that’s maybe what you’re thinking of… 

I ran a kids garden program, we planted a bunch, we had it, it just reseeds itself, they produce 1000s and 1000s of seeds. Moved away from that amatanth, I grow the globe kind that doesn’t produce nearly the same amount of seeds… but if you want to grow the other kind you will probably have it for life and just need to pluck out in the places you don’t want it… not just beauty for the pollinators and the beneifical insects …

Last year there was this cloudy day, the insect activity was amazing, I ended up I called my husband out and we just stood there it was like the garden had it’s whole energy that was just beating thgouthout it this insect activity … flitting from flower to flower, flying all around, energy moving through the garden … really cool to watch… 

INSECT trouble

If you have some problems with insects the ones you don’t want in your garden, you can kind lucre the insects you do want in with flowers!

Always extciting to hear that! Im sure listeners know some of that… it’s always encouraging to do anything to to put flowers in your garden and make it more beautiful anything to encrouage beneficial insects. ..

I’m scrolling through your book, there are all these great checklists and worksheets. I love the vegetable worksheet, this is what I’d like to plant and place for notes… What things grow in your area, and I just ordered seeds from Bountiful Gardens and mike was like why did you order this it won’t grow here…

People from all over the US, I’m shipping the books out from my house, self published,,, all over the US an Canada, certainly we live in different zones, so you want to make sure….

Zone Correct

I live in zone 5 A so if you live in a zone somewhere near mine, if you live in California, or Florida, or Texas or maybe a high alpine area, you might have things that you can grow where you don’t if you live in a short season area, there’s only so much I can say about that, so you’l have to do a little bit of diggin around in your local area …

Local growers in your info, go to the farmers market, what food are you selling…. hopefully it’s a producers only farmer’s market… I’ve been to markets where you can sell bananas, the Minneapolis…

IF it’s a producers only markte you’ll have  farmers in their area selling stuff that they grow…

ways to get

Farmers are professional

I used to work on some CSA farms, I learned about

I still go to my local farmers market, I like to check out what people have at certain time of year, so I check out what they have… especially in the spirng because that’s when I’m needing it the most…

• how did you get kale in May, 
• when did plant this?
• what variety of tomatos are you growing?

That’s a great way to get information and I actually talk about this more in the chapter on Variety… When it comes to variety for your garden …when you open a seed catalog or if you get more then one, you’re staring at 1000s and 1000s of variety and I get really overwhelmeed! 

Variety really does make a difference, I am continually testing varitiesies in my garden… 

there’s a lot of variety that don’t perform to my standards, and then I just get rid of…. others I plant over and over again year after year… it’s wroth the effort to tract and record

over time fill your garden with that work really welll… I sitll get red pepper, Jimmy Nardelos peppers I’m always gonna get peppers no mater what the season, weather, I know I’m always gonna get peppers.

• what’s your favorite pepper variety?
• what carrot variety do you grow?
• I was having problems with brussel sprouts

I went to the farm stand,and he had all these great  my brussel sprouts stink this year, and I asked him… he gave me the variety they grow and  I think they were growing Naltic, and Nustus…

Don’t be afraid to ask questions

what are they having success with…

know

Yes,

I actually wrote a blog post about this, someone posted in one of the Facebook groups, she had a garden plan, with a map and she was really organized, she had 10 tomatoes all the same variety I think Brandywine,

four rows of bush beans, kentucky wonder, I don’t recommend all your eggs in one basket, by

if your planting 10 tomato plants you should have a variety of tomaotes, can kind of pick up the slack, they are having a problem, all of the tomatoes are splitting on one variety

not a lot of vegetables that I am growing only one variety

and it’s fun to try different things

6 different kales, and 8 different peppers

I plant 35 pepper plants, red ones and organic ones and little ones and big ones, even if you have a small garden, 2 of one, 5 different varieties… what varieties work in your garden.

Narrow down what your favorites are

good performing

top perfromers

foundation what I can always rely upon, or ones that look like fun, some of the varieties I really like to keep

Veggie essentails. I’ve been teaching a lot of different parts of it, it was inspired by my lovely younger sister who lived in

concrete patio out back, had to grow in containers, it was fascinating the different questions she would ask me, when I plant and onion how many onions would I get…

in a subconscious way… if I plant one onion…. a kale I can go back to

all the way I can go back, one plant is proviing lots of different harvest

if I plant one onion that was so fascinating that she asked me that,

one onion you get one noino, then I’m not...