Cultivating curiosity and confidence
In my first book, The Year Round Vegetable Gardener, I detailed the many ways I use cold frames to extend my homegrown harvest into winter. However, a cold frame is also an easy way to get a jump start on spring, planting weeks – even months – earlier than in traditional vegetable gardens.
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Now that spring is on our doorstep, many of us are getting anxious to head out to the garden and clean things up. I know I am. We see all the dead ornamental grass stalks, the spent perennial stems, and the autumn leaves collected in our gardens and they give us spring fever. We want to bolt outside and spring clean the garden as soon as we can because we know that as the days get warmer, there will be more and more gardening chores to do. But, don’t head out with your favorite clippers and rake just yet! There’s a right way and a wrong way to do a spring garden clean up.
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Every year, I have to make sure that I make lots of room for growing tomatoes in raised beds. I love to plant a variety, from the little cherry tomatoes that you can pop in your mouth like candy, to those big juicy ones that you can slice for summer burgers.
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Let me get right to the point; you don’t need a big garden to grow more food. Even small space gardeners can boost their yield by practicing a few sneaky techniques like vertical gardening, intensive planting, and companion planting.
In recent weeks, the rapidly increasing cost of vegetables, like cauliflower ($8.99 at my local grocery store!), has made headlines across North America. With food prices expected to continue to rise in the near future, more homeowners are turning to veggie gardens to offset the price of groceries. For those who are new to gardening – or at least new to food gardening – here are six vegetable gardening tips to get you started.
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I love to add to a variety of annuals with beautiful blooms to my containers, borders, and raised beds for visual interest—and for the pollinators that frequent my edible gardens (we like to call this idea of planting ornamentals in our edible gardens, and vice versa, Garden BFFs). There are three annual flowers that I tend to plant every year in my gardens, raised beds, and containers: zinnias, nasturtiums, and calibrachoas. I have a few favourite varieties, but each gardening season seems to bring a new one to market.
