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!

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!

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.

You can download the first 30 days here while you’re waiting for it to come in the mail.

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!

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!

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...

I’m so excited because is gonna energize us and it’s Sunday January 6th and I just talked with Lindsey Jean Hard yesterday who wrote the book Cooking With Scraps!

Hi everyone! I’m glad you got a chance to talk to Lindsay Jean and I interviewed her and it was really valuable. I have the cookbook in hand! Today, I want to share what I am up to in this transition the holidays I’ve been making things like

• polenta
• And craving cooling herbs
• mint
• cilantro
• coconut! Shredded coconut and coconut milk

recognizing my body’s wanting to cool off from the inflammatory foods of the holidays! IDK if anyone is experiencing that.

I can totally relate except in a different sense. I was really good during the holidays, it’s more of an after the holidays problem.

I went home, had a great holiday with my family! I hadn’t been the four of us, my parents and my brother and I, and especially with my brother and I and just thankful to soak up all of that love! And maybe a little more gluten and sugar then I normally eat

my body was really feeling that for a while

I got home still wanted

I had this cornmeal from Wicked Good Farm

Last night we had friends over, and so I put a whole chicken in a crock pot

chicken had been with

• tomatoes
• onions
• peppers

put that over polenta!

We also made polenta fries!

I’m happy to tell how to make those things

using organic cornmeal and having something different then just flour is really nice!

I feel like I get that nourishment without getting inundated with sweet things!

There was a restaurant in Ann Arbor that had really good polenta fries! I think it was Grizzly Peak Brewing Company.

Make polenta like you would

1 cup fine to medium cornmeal to 4 cups of water you can...

I just want you to get a copy of

I interviewed Tara Austin Weaver and hope to release the full version of my interview today, but in the mean time, I think you should go to your library or local book store and pick up a copy of her inspiring and delightful memoire.

You can order her amazing book

on amazon in advance and while you’re waiting for it to come I recommend you read Orchard House: I guarantee it will inspire you to grow some food, grow some berries, and love your family!

It brought back so many memories for me of growing up with mother (and then marrying a man) who never stood still out in the garden. Something always needed (needs) pruned, pulled, weeded or tendered.

Her dedication to creating an oasis for her nieces to enjoy and her relationship with her family will probably bring back memories of growing up and sharing time together around food.

A delightful read from start to finish, nothing better on a cool winter day when you can’t get outside yourself!

So don’t forget order her new book and read the memoire and leave her a review on Amazon so more people will be inspired as well!

The Organic Gardener Podcast is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com

and don’t forget if you need help getting started check out our new

Remember you can get the 2018 Garden Journal and Data Keeper to record your garden goals in our

Today, I’m excited to introduce my guest from Tara Austen Weaver who’s written a book about growing

Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest: How to Grow Abundant, Organic Fruit in Your Backyard

I know that you are going to love this because it’s got lots of great tips for anyone living anywhere not just in the Northwest and I’m super excited because last summer I was visiting Nola’s yard last summer because her blueberries were amazing and I am bound and determined to grow some this year! And there’s just so much to learn so welcome to the show!

My mom had a giant organic garden!

It wasn’t till I moved to Seattle about 10 years ago that everything fell into place, Seattle has such a giant gardening community!

Everyone here it seems even if they just grow beautiful yards edible ones and everyone is out working and tending vegetables

• quickly used up all of the area
• didn’t have much of a yard
• I got a community garden plot
• started studying permaculture

I’m coming off not a fantastic garden year, because I moved this spring! I wasn’t thinking it through thinking I could move and garden and that didn’t really happen!

I have a busy life and in the summer I also like to go hiking. I am really really interested in those things that don’t need as much help and tending as lettuce and peas do

those twelve blueberry bushes were fine and asked nothing of me!

• this jam
• crisp

you can make with any fruit

the other thing people don’t realize

commercial growers grow certain varieties because they stand up to transport that will stand up on the shelf.

There are a lot of amazing varieties that don’t get grown commercially because they are just too fragile.

not grown commercially

They really need to be processed within 24 hours

They have the most amazing flavor

Today, I’m excited to introduce my guest from Tara Austen Weaver who’s written a book about growing

Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest: How to Grow Abundant, Organic Fruit in Your Backyard

I know that you are going to love this because it’s got lots of great tips for anyone living anywhere not just in the Northwest and I’m super excited because last summer I was visiting Nola’s yard last summer because her blueberries were amazing and I am bound and determined to grow some this year! And there’s just so much to learn so welcome to the show!

My mom had a giant organic garden!

I guess I’m sort of a second generation gardener I actually grew up not really liking to garden I liked playing and running around but weeding seemed like drudgery to me!

I have all these very visceral memories of just being out in the garden and sunshine, my mom would pop cherry tomatoes into our mouths when we were kids, because we just picked it in the sunshine!

fruit that was warm from a tree

So I have all these really positive memories of being in a garden but not doing any work!

I was living in San Francisco in my late 20s, early 30s

I remember one year for my birthday I got the idea to build these window boxes ~ I had gotten into cooking. I wanted to grow herbs.

It is so irritating to buy a whole bunch of parsley when you just need a sprig.

I lugged these boxes home and I’m dangling out this window and holding this heavy drill and I got them put up and filled them with soil and nestled my tiny little herbs and was so so pleased!

Then within a week or two, I noticed the sage leaves had this kind of white stuff on it. I was concerned and I lived on the foggy side of the city and thought oh my is this is fungus or blight on my herbs and when I went to investigate I discovered it was pigeon poop and I realized I wasn’t gonna be a gardener in the city.

It wasn’t till I moved to Seattle about 10 years ago that everything fell into place, Seattle has such a giant gardening community!

Everyone here it seems even if they just grow beautiful yards edible ones and everyone is out working and tending vegetables

• quickly used up all of the area
• didn’t have much of a yard
• I got a community garden plot
• started studying permaculture

For the last 9 years we have been collaborating

there were 9 fruit trees on the property but they were engulfed in blackberries

Andrea Catherine introduced me to Lindsay Jean Hard who wrote

something I’m super passionate about and learning about. She blogs at this place called Food52, which I love reading and I get their emails it’s always exciting! I was just reading somewhere about broccoli stems were even more nutritious then the florets maybe we’re gonna learn more about nutrition too!

Well, i don’t necessarily have a nutrition background but there is a lot to be said as far as nutrients and great things in the peels and things that we tend to discard a lot! There’s benefits to not throwing our scraps away!

Oh year I was loving he sugar peels looked awesome because I’m always trying to get more fruit and fiber in my diet and I think there’s a lot of fiber in the peel right?

My path to where I am now has been an interesting one

Like you said I got my masters in Urban Planning here at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I worked for our local downtown development authority for a couple of years, so that was a solid 2 years to put masters to good use. Then my husband and I moved to Japan.

The intersection of cooking and writing. We joined a CSA when we were there where we would walk down the street to the local grocery store and pick up a box of vegetables.

every week walking into the store to ask

what is in my box

That’s where I first started thinking about cooking with scraps because I knew these farmers taking this time and energy to grow.

putting it all to great use

friends of ours from college

told us they were going to start

Real Time Farms.com

resource to find farmers near them and learn about their growing practices and connect with restaurants and see where those restaurants were sourcing their ingredients from

It was a really exciting time to be working for a start up

It’s a food and lifestyle website. I worked for them for 6 years

community management

Happy Anniversary to you Green Future Growers. Thank you for letting me be your host of the

I hope to finish up the updates to Free Garden Course and the workbook for you this day or this week at the latest!

Let’s get growing!