Just Grow Something | Evidence-Based Home Gardening – Details, episodes & analysis

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

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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:

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What exactly does that name on the plant tag or seed packet mean? How does that affect what we plant and how or where we plant it? On this Focal Point Friday, let's go way back to Episode 6 to demystify plant nomenclature and the differences between open-pollinated, heirloom, and hybrid.

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Did you know that poor diet is the leading cause of disease worldwide? Diets low in fruits and vegetables contribute significantly to some of the world’s most widespread and debilitating nutrient-related disorders. Which is why many of us garden. We want to include those fruits and vegetables in our diet.

And, if we have limited space, we need to be particular about what we’re planting. When I help people plan their gardens, I’m always reminding them to go back and review their “why”. If your goal for your garden is to reduce your family’s food budget, like mine was in the beginning, then maybe the things you should prioritize planting are the things your family eats the most or the things that cost you the most in the grocery or at the market.

But, if we’re gardening to increase the overall nutrition our family consumes, does that mean we should be focused on planting something other than our most purchased items? And, if it’s all about saving dollars, can we grow things that make us feel fuller longer because they’re more nutritious? Which fruits and vegetables degrade the most from the time they leave the farm to when they hit our plate? Which fruits and vegetables the most nutrient-dense overall?

On today’s episode I’ll give you the rundown on some studies that have been done about which vegetables decline in nutrition the fastest, which ones are the most nutrient-dense overall, and what we need to do in our own gardens post-harvest to preserve those nutrients that we’ve worked so hard to grow. Let’s dig in!

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RESOURCES

Ep. 52 - Cabbage

Low Energy Density Foods and Recipes: Will They Help You Feel Full with Fewer Calories? | Optimising Nutrition

Optimising foods for satiety - ScienceDirect

Maximizing the Nutritional Value of Fruits and Vegetables (ucdavis.edu)

Nutritional comparison of fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables. Part 1. Vitamins C and B and phenolic compounds (ahealthylife.nl)

Vegetables_122107_S (fda.gov)

Fruits_122107_S (fda.gov)

Postharvest Handling | USU

Harvesting and storing home garden vegetables | UMN Extension

On this week's Focal Point Friday episode, I'm following up with questions and comments I got about some recent episodes about phytoremediation, commercial compost, and using manure in the garden safely.

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Celery is a cool-season crop that can be a bit finicky about its growing conditions. If carrots are divas, then consider celery Goldilocks: not too hot, not too cold, but just right!  On today’s episode I give you the lowdown on growing your own celery at home and this includes those of you who live in warmer climates. The main consideration for celery is it takes a really long time to grow from seed and it can be a water hog if you want those big plump stalks. Some varieties need to be trenched and mounded in order to get those pale stalks like you’re used to seeing the grocery store, and they don’t tolerate a heavy frost. And even though they don’t like the heat, too much time spent below a certain temperature can actually cause them to bolt. But, if you know how to mitigate all those things, the flavor of homegrown celery can be so much more intense than what you get in the store. Let's dig in!

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Resources:

Umbellifer or apiaceae? - Richard Jackson Garden (richardjacksonsgarden.co.uk)

Apium graveolens (Smallage, Wild Celery) | North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (ncsu.edu)

Celery / Apium graveolens Herbal Medicine, Health Benefits, Side Effects (medicalhealthguide.com)

Everything you didn’t even know you wanted to know about celery - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

Cel-Ray - Wikipedia

Explore Cornell - Home Gardening - Vegetable Growing Guides - Growing Guide

Celery | College of Agricultural Sciences (oregonstate.edu)

What manures are "safe" to use in the garden and which ones need to be composted? The question came from a listener and the answer may surprise you.

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Resources:

Animal-Manure-in-the-Garden.pdf (wsu.edu)

Bunny honey: Using rabbit manure as a fertilizer - MSU Extension

Colorado Master Gardener Training (colostate.edu)

Purchasing compost and potting soil can be expensive and new garden beds can take a lot of soil to fill them. Plus, we’ve talked before that commercial compost often needs a little help getting the microbes up and moving again in order to make it biologically active and not just an inert material that’s not helping our plants at all. So, filling a raised bed with nothing but trucked in compost and bags of potting mix just isn’t the way to go. If you’ve gotten behind on building your beds or you’re just now deciding you need to create some, especially if you’re creating a garden for the first time, it’s important to know what to fill those beds with. 

Today we’ll talk about different techniques we can use to fill those raised beds properly so that the growing medium is not only biologically active, which is helping the plants get the nutrients they need, but also doesn’t break the bank.

Ep. 80 - Creating and Managing a Compost Pile 

Ep. 81 - Talking Compost with Stan "The Compost Man"Slaughter 

Ep. 82 - Compost Systems for Home Gardeners 

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Resources:

Effect of high compost temperature on enzymatic activity and species diversity of culturable bacteria in cattle manure compost - ScienceDirect

Microbiological parameters as indicators of compost maturity | Journal of Applied Microbiology | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

For this week’s Focal Point Friday, I answer a question asked by a student in my Plan Like a Pro garden planning course last week. She wanted some clarification on what I mean when I’m talking about intercropping. “Does that mean I plant another crop in between the rows of the other or does it mean the second crop is spaced in the same row as the other crop.”

Companion Planting Chart

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