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

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) Heirloom Roses: Use code JUSTGROW for 20% off! Through Oct. 31st, 2024 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: Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group 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: Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Buy Me a Coffee! 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. These pages are all designed to look like legitimate gardening blogs or how-to sites, but they all have two things in common – they are meant to earn money from the overwhelming number of ads being displayed and they are all written by artificial intelligence. 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 Vote for me in the Women in Podcasting Awards! Save on a Magic Mind Subscription with code justgrowsomething20 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 Vote for me in the Women in Podcasting Awards! Home Page - National Center for Home Food Preservation (uga.edu) Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (Updated Edition)

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!

Back on episode 200, the Ask Me Anything episode, someone asked if I would do an episode on growing Brussels sprouts. I said no at the time because I hadn’t yet successfully grown them but indicated it may be soon because Brussels were having a moment in my garden this spring and it was looking good. Well, here we are and we’re talking Brussels because I managed to successfully grow and harvest a summer crop from a spring planting and have round two of seedlings started already for planting soon for a fall harvest. So, today on Just Grow Something, we’re talking Brussels sprouts! The background of the plant, how to grow it, what pests and disease plague it, and how to harvest and store. It’s a full blown crop specific episode that will hopefully demystify growing these teeny cabbage look-a-likes in your own garden. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: The Great Marigold Debate - Ep. 147 Weather History & Data Archive | Weather Underground (wunderground.com) Health Benefits of Brussels Sprouts Explore Cornell - Home Gardening - Vegetable Growing Guides - Growing Guide Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

Maybe you’ve heard the origin story of how I started gardening and then came to be a market farmer which lead to me getting a degree in horticulture which led to me doing this podcast. The short story is I had a really successful, very large, garden and I was sick of being stuck inside all the time working my day job and tried to find a way to make some side money from the garden, and the rest is history. Maybe you’ve been in the same position. A lot of gardeners do really, really well a couple seasons in a row and realize just how much they enjoy being in the garden and growing things and daydream about setting up a little stand at the end of the driveway once a week or going to the local farmer’s market. Would you believe me if I told you selling the produce from your garden isn’t the only way to make money from it? Today on Just Grow Something we are talking ten different ways you can make money from your garden and only a couple of them involve selling the actual fruits and veggies. This is a very high-level look at the options you have so you can start thinking about what might actually fit into your lifestyle. Because, let me tell you, after 17 seasons of selling every week at the farmer’s market, it is hard work, and there are definitely other options available to you. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Save on a Magic Mind subscription or one-time purchase with code JUSTGROWSOMETHING20 at MagicMind.com/justgrowsomething Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

It’s the middle of July and it’s the time of year when heat stress in plants can be a significant challenge for gardeners. If you’re gardening in the peak of summer or in a region with consistently high temperatures, heat stress can lead to wilting, reduced yields, poor fruit quality, and even cause plants to just up and die. But, we can do something about it. Lots of things, actually. Today on Just Grow Something we’re talking effective management of heat stress in our plants, including preventive measures and actions to take after our plants are affected. We will talk all the strategies we can take to help maintain a healthy garden despite the heat. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Save on a Magic Mind subscription or one-time purchase with code JUSTGROWSOMETHING20 at MagicMind.com/justgrowsomething Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

If you are in any gardening group, whether an in-person club or online, you likely see countless home remedies for everything that ails our plants. Gardeners tout everything as a miracle cure for something in the garden, from putting tums in the soil to burying fish, making weed killer out of vinegar and salt (please don’t) to using dawn dish soap as an insecticide (again, please don’t). One that pops up over and over again is using Epsom salts, either sprinkled or added to the soil or used as a foliar spray when diluted in water. I’ve seen it recommended for blossom end rot, boosting plant growth, germinating seeds and other random maladies. But, is it really good for your plants? Does it help with any of that stuff or is it just another case of correlation over causation? Today on Just Grow Something we’re digging into Epsom salts. What they are, if they can help in the garden, and, if so, with what exactly. That way next time someone recommends Epsom salts for curing the yellowing leaves on your plant you’ll be able to decide for yourself whether that’s an effective plan. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Ep. 18 - Garden Talk Tuesday: Plant Nutrients and Why You Need to Know Them Ep. 22 - Garden Talk Tuesday: Plant Nutrient Deficiencies and Toxicity Focal Point Friday: Plant Nutrient Basics   Photosynthetic activity and onion growth response to compost and Epsom salt: International Journal of Vegetable Science: Vol 26, No 6 (tandfonline.com) IMPACT OF EPSOM SALT APPLICATION ON BIOCHEMICAL CHANGES IN BEETROOT (Beta vulgaris L.). | Agricultural Research Journal | EBSCOhost Effects of Epsom (magnesium sulfate) salt on growth performance of water spinach (Ipomoea aquatica) in nutrient film technique and media-based aquaponics systems | Aquaculture International (springer.com) Effects of foliar and root application of epsom salt on aquaponics beetroot (Beta vulgaris) production in confined condition | Asian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (banglajol.info) The Response to Epsom Salt Sprays of Mature Apple Trees of Three Varieties on Two Contrasting Rootstocks: Journal of Horticultural Science: Vol 43, No 4 (tandfonline.com) Fertilize with Epsom Salts - Garden.org Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

Last week on the podcast we talked about your summer succession plantings, things you can plant in the summer and harvest in the summer on repeat. This week, it’s all about fall, baby. I know it may seem like the summer growing season just started, especially if you have very few frost-free days, but this really is the time to be planning for a fall harvest. In order to get a viable crop before your first frost date or first hard freeze or before your Persephone Period hits, the steps to get there start now. Today on Just Grow Something we are talking all things fall garden planning – what to plant, when to start your seeds, whether to grow from seeds or seedlings, timing the planting, and getting to harvest. By the end you will have a firm grasp on whether you want to tackle a fall garden and why I insist it’s one of the absolute best times of year to garden in most areas. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Save 10% on The Girly Homesteader Grow and Flourish Planner with code JUSTGROW Frost Dates: First and last frost dates by zipcode - Garden.org 2024 Frost Dates: First and Last Frost Dates by ZIP Code | The Old Farmer's Almanac | Almanac.com Just Grow Something Fall Garden Planning Challenge Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

We are officially in summer in the northern hemisphere and, for many of us, she came in with a bang. It will hit 100 F here today with a heat index of 112 F and it feels like walking in front of a blast furnace stepping out into the sun. This may make you think the summer growing season is a one-and-done situation, especially if you live somewhere further south than me where the temperatures can be even more brutal on a regular basis. I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. In fact, even if you live further north of me where the temperatures are just now finally warm enough to start planting warm-season crops, there are a slew of things that can be grown in the summer vegetable garden that you can plant multiple times to get a greater harvest from the garden. Today on Just Grow Something we’ll talk about the top five crops in different climates that can be successively planted throughout the summer. Whether your warm season is short or you’re gardening in a sauna, I guarantee there is something you can grow multiple times to increase your yield even if it feels like somebody opened the gates of Hades in your front yard. Let’s dig in. References and Resources: Subscribe NowJust Grow Something | The "Why" Behind the "How" of GardeningJune 18, 20244x20300:25:4523.59 MBWhen Are Onions Ready to Harvest? - Ep. 203 I posted a video last week on TikTok and Reels about how to tell if your onions are ready to harvest and there was a lot of feedback. Onions are one of those crops that can take a long time to master and, even then, getting a good harvest can be hit or miss. Which is probably why that video got the response it did. Today on Just Grow Something we’ll go over how to tell if your onions are ready to harvest, when you should wait, and when you should pull them early based on the conditions of the plant. We’ll also talk about what can go wrong with onions causing them to either bolt prematurely or never get to the size we’d hoped. There are lots of intricacies to successfully growing onions but once we understand the things they rely on to produce, it does get easier. A little. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Visit HeirloomRoses.com and take 20% off your order of roses with code JUSTGROW through October 31, 2024 Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

I posted a video last week on TikTok and Reels about how to tell if your onions are ready to harvest and there was a lot of feedback. Onions are one of those crops that can take a long time to master and, even then, getting a good harvest can be hit or miss. Which is probably why that video got the response it did. Today on Just Grow Something we’ll go over how to tell if your onions are ready to harvest, when you should wait, and when you should pull them early based on the conditions of the plant. We’ll also talk about what can go wrong with onions causing them to either bolt prematurely or never get to the size we’d hoped. There are lots of intricacies to successfully growing onions but once we understand the things they rely on to produce, it does get easier. A little. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Ep. 114 - Planting Onions to Overwinter Ep. 133 - Growing Onions Visit HeirloomRoses.com and take 20% off your order of roses with code JUSTGROW through October 31, 2024 Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

Well, I dropped the ball! This is a follow up to Tuesdays episode about problems in cucumbers. I failed to mention two pests that plague many gardeners - squash vine borers and squash bugs. So, let's remedy this situation! Spend a quick 15 minutes with me while we talk about these pests and how to prevent them.

The summer gardening season is just about in full swing here in the northern hemisphere and cucumbers are definitely a crowd favorite. Whether you’re growing the for slicing, snacking, or pickling, a properly managed cucumber vine can be very productive. But it seems like when things go wrong with cucumbers, they go really wrong. Whether it’s dying plants, funky looking fruit, diseases, or other issues with our favorite cucurbit, we do have preventions and solutions. Today on Just Grow Something we’re talking all about the problems we might have with cucumbers – pests and diseases, nutrient challenges, strange deformities, and more. By the end you should have a firm grasp on how to prevent these problems from occurring and how to recognize what you’re dealing with when they do. Let’s dig in! References and Resources: Identifying Nutrient Deficiencies in Your Garden Plants Visit HeirloomRoses.com and take 20% off your order of roses with code JUSTGROW through October 31, 2024 Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something

Welcome to the 200th episode of the Just Grow Something podcast, my gardening friends! I launched this podcast back in February of 2021 as a way to pass on the gardening knowledge I had gained from my experiences on our own homestead and farm and what I had learned as I worked my way through my horticulture degree at Oregon State University. I’ve continued to learn along the way and pass on as much of that to you as I reasonably can in the 30 minutes or so a week we spend together here, as well as Reels and TikTok videos, the articles I write over on the website, the Facebook group and probably a few places I’m forgetting about. Getting into the rhythm of coming up with a topic each week, recording, editing, and publishing that episode, plus trying to put creatives together to post to social media to promote those episodes took some time and I still don’t’ always get the social media part of it right! Some of you have been along for the ride since day one, some of you are brand-new; no matter where you fall on that scale, I am sincerely happy you are here and we can all be learning and growing as gardeners together. This season I’ve been asking you a question each month to send in your answers but today, you are asking the questions and I am doing the answering. To celebrate 200 episodes, I did an “ask me anything” and you all had some great questions. Some about gardening, some about the business of farming, some personal, and I am here to answer them all. Let’s dig in!

One of the most labor-intensive parts of growing some of our garden crops, like tomatoes, can be trellising them. Other plants naturally just climb whatever we place next to them without much intervention from us, but they do sometimes need some initial guidance. Cucumbers and peas are two good examples of this. Often times this depends on the type of trellis we’re using. The type of trellis we use boils down to personal preference, the amount of space we have, the materials available to us, and whether we’re gardening in an in-ground space or utilizing raised planters. Today on Just Grow Something, we’re going to cover the multiple trellising options for tomatoes, cucumbers, peas and beans. Many of these trellising options can be utilized for other crops, too, and some of them are multi-purpose for any of these crops. By the end you will have a multitude of techniques to choose from so you can make the best choice for your gardening situation. Let’s dig in! Question of the month: Ask me anything! Reach out and ask me whatever you want to know, gardening or non-gardening, and I'll answer your question next week for our 200th episode! References and Resources: Visit HeirloomRoses.com and take 20% off your order of roses with code JUSTGROW through October 31, 2024 Just Grow Something Gardening Friends Facebook Group Check out how you can become a patron on Patreon Follow me on Instagram JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com Merchandise | Just Grow Something