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

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, w...

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 ca...

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...

One of the strategies I use and encourage other gardeners to use for getting the most out of their gardens each year is succession planting. This is the process of planting a new crop of something after the first one has a little bit of growth on it so that we can harvest pretty continuously or planting a second crop after a first one has given its all.

This might make you think that you need to be buying new transplants or startin...

Growing peppers is one of the most asked about topics at the farm stand and the most played episodes of this podcast. Most of the time the frustration comes with either not getting bell peppers to grow large enough or other problems for peppers, in general, including sunscald, lack of ripening, and just generally poor plant growth and low production levels. And, of course, there are the problems with pests and diseases.

Today on Ju...

I hear from a lot of frustrated would-be gardeners at the farmer’s market stand who say they just don’t have enough sun in their yard to be able to grow anything. Of course, they can always go to maximum effort by growing in smaller containers and moving them around the yard as the season progresses to catch the light as the sun shifts, which is a lot of work, but it’s also very possible that many of these potential gardeners have ...

Foliar diseases in both vegetable and fruit plants can significantly impact our yield and the quality of that yield if left unmanaged. If you’ve ever had powdery mildew on your cucumbers or early blight in your tomatoes, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Even though the disease is affecting the leaves, the interruption of photosynthesis by the fungus affects the fruit development, and then the disease will jump from the leav...

We talk a lot about growing vegetables on this show but, in truth, I am a huge fruit eater. I love fruit, either on it’s own or on a salad, in smoothies, in desserts, love it. Being someone who is a proponent of sustainable agriculture I also prefer to get my fruits locally if I can. That’s not to say I don’t always have bananas in this house and that I don’t love a good Mandarin orange, but if I can grow it myself, I feel much bet...

Using the last frost date in spring or our average air temperatures might be a good guideline to start with when figuring out when to plant the garden, but a better method for knowing when it’s actually time to sow those seeds or transplant those plants is the soil temperature. Even though the air temperatures may be warmer than usual, the soil knows the truth. If that soil is cold and wet, or might be that way in the next ten days...

Back in November I talked to you about doing a soil test, using slow-release amendments in the garden to do their work gradually over the winter, and then doing another soil test in the spring to see how well it worked. Now’s the time in most areas to be doing that spring soil test before you start planting your spring or summer gardens.

But, what do you do if that spring test shows the amendments you added in the fall just weren’t...

I had such a fantastic response to the March Question of the Month and we had such great conversations on Facebook and Instagram that I made this week’s entire episode all about! You came in clutch with problems and solutions and there was plenty of community discussion, which is what I love. Gardeners helping gardeners.

We all have a lot of pests and some very clever ways to deal with them. And not all of them are insects. So, tod...

Hardening off is a process that helps plants adjust to the outdoor environment, preventing shock and ensuring they thrive once planted in the garden. Gradual exposure helps the plants acclimate to the conditions they will experience out in the garden or in their containers on your porch before you put them out there.

Today on Just Grow Something we’ll go over the exact steps we need to take to harden off our plants prior to putting...

Years ago I had some straw bales I’d used initially as fall décor that ended up in my chicken coop. The bales were used partially as a wind break all winter and partially as a roost. Well, chickens do what chickens do when they roost and by the spring of the following year those straw bales were full of nitrogen-rich chicken poop and starting to fall apart. So, I moved the out of the coop, watered the down really well for about a w...

Today's episode is a special interview with Meg Lea of the Fox and Hound Garden in Wisconsin. Meg harvested an unbelievable amount of food from her Zone 4b gardens last year and donated over two thirds of it.

We chat about all things gardening, from planning to production, donations and dollar roadside stands, overambitious plantings and failing forward. It's a great conversation with a fellow gardener that you'll love ...

If you’re planning to put in new fruit trees, bushes, or canes in your garden the best time of year, generally, is spring. We want the soil to warm up enough that the roots of the plants will begin to seek out water and nutrients as soon as placed in the ground with as little transplant shock as possible. But, if we have existing fruit trees, bushes, or canes then any maintenance on those trees should be done before the soil begins...

Potatoes are a cool season crop, and most varieties need between 60 and 120 days to mature, so that means getting them in the ground as soon as the soil can be worked and giving them the time they need to grow. The great thing about potatoes is they can be harvested at any size, so it’s a crop that can do well in a short-season area and can also be grown in places other than big, long in-ground rows. If you have minimal space or yo...

This month we’re talking a lot about seed starting and we can’t talk about starting seeds without talking about heat and light. Seeds sprout more quickly and efficiently when they’ve got the correct soil temperatures and the easiest way to do this is with a seedling heat mat. It’s not a requirement, though, so we’ll also talk about some ways you can up the ante on the soil temperatures during seed starting without a heat mat.

Once ...

Seed starting does not need to be intimidating but it does come with a special set of requirements for true success. Two components to that success are the soils we use and the containers we choose. Not all soils and containers are created equal. Today we dig into the different types of seed starting mediums and containers available on the market and ones we can dig up in our own home. (Pun intended.) Ssurprise surprise, the pottin...