429. Five Reasons You Should Build A Kitchen Garden

429. Five Reasons You Should Build A Kitchen Garden

People often ask me, “What is a kitchen garden?” What it is not is a garden in your kitchen. It’s not a tower full of lettuce growing in water next to your microwave or a pot of herbs on your windowsill. The answer is actually quite simple: a kitchen garden is essentially a bed of fruits, vegetables, and herbs you like to use for cooking, located near your kitchen. Convenience is one of the biggest keys to successful gardening.


One ~ A kitchen garden is easier to care for if it’s located just outside your kitchen door, where you do your cooking. This might not always be possible, depending on your garden's position in the sun, but the closer you can get to accessing your main cooking area, the better.

Two ~ A kitchen garden is easier to harvest from, making it more likely you will eat those vegetables you took so much time to grow. And they’ll thrive the more time you spend in your beds harvesting and caring for your little seedlings.

Three ~ A kitchen garden that uses deep beds will also make your veggies grow stronger. This is because the roots can go deeper, water can circulate around them more fluently, and they can soak up all the nutrients they need. Additionally, the best soil possible is included.

Four ~ A kitchen garden is easier to water. A kitchen usually has a water supply, so even if you don’t have a hose that will reach, filling a watering can from the sink will keep those baby seedlings moist when they are first germinating, one of the struggles of growing plants from seed.

Five ~ A kitchen garden can contain a compost pipe, also known as a worm tube (just a piece of perforated 6” or bigger PVC pipe), making recycling your kitchen scraps easier than you’ve ever believed, while providing fresh nutrients to your garden all season long. To keep animals out, just cover with a plate or an upside-down clay pot bottom. Drop leftover food scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, and even weeds down the tube. Worms will then turn these bits of waste into nutritious food for your soil and plants. You want your pipe to be about 21/2 feet long with the lower 18 inches buried into the soil.

Last spring, my husband finally made my kitchen garden dreams come true, and this year I built one for my mom in her garden. We planted companion plants like basil and tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, and sunflowers along the back of the bed near the garage to attract beneficial insects. We added nasturtiums, which not only add a peppery flavor and pretty color to summer salads but also serve as a natural deterrent to pests with their strong odor. An old trellis I found made an excellent climbing post for pole beans, something I can’t plant in our frosty Montana beds — and some lettuce, arugula, and radishes to pick first in the early spring.

Despite my mom's repeated assurances that she could never get eggplants to grow, a couple of Black Beauties, did a great job producing a few delicious purple aubergines, one of her favorite vegetables to cook. Each corner grew a big squash, and I could only dream about my mom’s famous flower fritters that were a delicacy when we were kids.

As we head into fall, it's a great time to design and build a kitchen garden for next spring and get started collecting those compost scraps, creating lots of healthy soil to fill those beds with.



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Bee a part of the solution | The Sustainability Project | Care Bellamy the beekeeping REALTOR®  who “Cares” | Florida

Bee a part of the solution | The Sustainability Project | Care Bellamy the beekeeping REALTOR® who “Cares” | Florida

I’m so excited I have a listener on the line who is going to share a ton of golden seeds! I talked to her before from Florida and she is going to share with us about her Sustainability Project! 1. Tell us a little about yourself. By day, I’m a REALTOR® and beekeeper. I’m also a 3rd generation farmer.  My grandparents owned a 100 acre wheat farm on the prairie in rural Dufresne, Manitoba. My family lived off the land, they grew their food seasonally in a 1 acre vegetable garden. After the local community collectively brought in the fall harvest, they would busily preserve and can their produce for storage in their root cellar. These people were a hardy bunch, they managed to survive the brutually harsh winters with minimal resources using a wood burning stove for heat, crude electric and no running water or indoor plumbing. They kept and cared for livestock and only took what they needed to survive, my ancestors practiced “The Tragedy of the Commons” method.  That’s how they managed to raise a family of 8 in rural Manitoba. And Manitoba is where people go to see the polar bears right? Yes Churchill Manitoba is where the polar bears are. Then you went to the opposite end of the continent practically to Florida. Yes I did I got hired to work for Disney at the Epcot Center back in the early 80s and that’s where I met my husband two weeks later and we’ve been here ever since! That’s so romantic! I always wanted to work for Disney, I tried to get a job or get into art school at the California Institute of Arts in LA. Well, they must have liked me! I managed to beat out 64 other people fro the job! So yay for me! And you worked there for a long time right? Yes 35 years! 2. Tell me about your first gardening experience? We used to visit the farm in the summer time every two years, however my mom! When my mother moved to the big city of Toronto, Ontario, she became a backyard farmer and composter carrying on her family farming tradition. I began helping my mother garden as a young child, she taught me valuable lessons in planting, harvesting and food preservation skills. All these years later I’ve been utilizing this and it’s been working out fantastic for me. Luckily for me, both my parents were award winning gardeners so pulling weeds or fresh carrots comes naturally. So then is it challenging down in Florida? Do you have to learn different practices to grow in that climate? Well, gardening is pretty much the same wherever you go. IT’s just the conditions and the climate. In Florida there is a sandy soil, where my parents lived it was a deep rich soil. You have to plant things things that grow...

7 Tammi 201959min

Replay of 2018 Garden Goals Challenge from the Organic Gardener Podcast! 2019 challenge coming VERY SOON!

Replay of 2018 Garden Goals Challenge from the Organic Gardener Podcast! 2019 challenge coming VERY SOON!

I’m so close to wrapping up Free Garden Course.com and I know you are going to love the new one that will take place in a real google classroom! When it’s ready, we’ll have a new 2019 Garden Goals challenge and full color workbook I think you will love! Go ahead and listen to last year’s challenge. There’s a facebook group you can join and even access the google classroom with access code 75yju4. Do you want to save time in your garden? Do you want to grow a garden full of healthy vegetables but feel you don’t have time? Do you struggle to get all the weeds pulled and watering done in the heat of summer when your friends are all headed to the lake? Are you tired of paying the high cost of organic vegetables in the store but struggle to grow your own? Well, our 2018 Garden Goals Challenge will help you find success in your garden journey! Free Garden Course.com So, if you follow me you probably know that I created a Free Garden Course also known as Free Organic Garden Course over Christmas break! Days 1-8 2018GardenGoalsChallenge For the first 8 days of 2018 I’m going to walk you through the steps of planning your garden goals so you are growing awesome nutrient dense vegetables with the least amount of work and time. Now I’m not gonna fool you and say it’s all gonna be easy but I will say it will be worth it.  Day One is all about brainstorming!  You can  download the first 30 days here   while you’re waiting for it to come in the mail.  <img class="size-medium wp-image-4367 aligncenter" src="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SailboatPeas-225x300.jpg" alt="boat of peas" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://organicgardenerpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SailboatPeas-225x300.jpg 225w,...

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