This section has been added to starting in 2023 and continued through now. I try to indicate what year what section was written, but those sections are written from the perspective of being current events since they were current when they were written.

I started container gardening to supplement my family’s produce consumption and offset some of our food costs, but what started as a potential means to stretch our dollar for food became an effort to not only grow a functional medicinal herb garden but to create a space with native plant diversity to support our local pollinators.The first year I had tomato plants and a few pepper plants in 5 gallon Home Depot buckets.

The following year I reused those buckets, added to the collection and expanded into larger planters and literally anything that would hold dirt (an old Rubbermaid tote even).

This year (2023) almost everything is being grown in containers in spite of the fact that I have a raised garden bed that I have spent the last 2 years constructing and filling with dirt and compostable material. This year (2023) I was able to plant 3 broccoli seedlings, some green onions, lavender, as well as several sunflowers. In addition to the things that I intentionally planted are several nightshade plants (unsure if they are woody or deadly), several milkweed volunteers, an abundance of lettuce volunteers from the plants that went to seed last year, and a few Michigan Pokeberry plants.

This year (2023) I discovered a page on Instagram called Homegrown National Park where they encourage people to plant native plants, trees, shrubs, and succulents and then register them with their site as a homegrown national park. They recognize plantings down to as small as 1sqft. I went through their site and found a link to audubon.org where I was able to find a list of plants native to my ecoregion and filter by the type of plant I wanted to find. They even have them for sale! There are some that I have been looking for since I started my herb garden, that I might end up ordering from them, others I already grow, and some I’m only just finding out about and need to look at my other sources before I plan to purchase established plants.

Patience is KEY. As is adequate light and water. Heating pads are great as long as you are starting seeds with the same germination time frame. If half of your seeds in a tray germinate and the others haven’t and you leave the heating pad on… the ones that have already sprouted will get leggy and weak. I’ve been using really small 16-20 cell trays this year (2023), but in all honesty I had better luck with the larger 2-inch pots last year (2022).

(2024) I experimented with large trays with tiny cells late in the seed starting season, I unfortunately did not get them in the ground as soon as I should have and the ones that survived being semi forgotten were somewhat stunted. (2025) Surprisingly these previously stunted plants came back with a vengeance this spring. I guess there is something to be said about forgetting that something is a perennial… pleasant surprises in the spring.

Starting your garden from seed, indoors, ahead of the last frost is great IF you have the space, time, patience, and resources for it. Benefits include, know what if any fertilizers were used on the seedlings, and being able to grow specific varieties of plants that you might not find as seedlings at a nursery. I like that by starting my own seeds I can experiment with things that I can’t find otherwise; for example black Goji berries or Wolf Berries. These dark, sweet, and highly nutritious fruits are a variation of the more widely known red Goji berries. I would say that I’m surprised that with the Wolf Berries being more nutritious than the red Goji berries and being sweeter, they aren’t more popular, but I can attribute that to the fact that Wolf berry plants take 4 years to mature to the point that they begin producing fruit. I’ve also had a really hard time growing them and keeping them alive.

Make sure you plant plenty of flowers in amongst your fruits and vegetables in order to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects. There are many plants that will attract insects that will get rid of pest insects for you and result in healthier plants and a bigger harvest.

It's so easy to see all these amazing plants and seeds and want to grow them all, but with all of the space requirements that some of them have (and for good reason) it's far too easy to start way more seeds than you can realistically fit into your gardening space. Also, seeds have a very real shelf life. It is better to buy conservatively and be able to plant everything and harvest a few seeds for the next year when you can buy some different seeds, than to have a TON of seeds that you are going to take years to plant… which may not geminate because they were too old when you finally got around to planting them.

This also applies to the amount of space you are cultivating. When planning a garden, keep in mind that weeding is a very real requirement and if you don’t stay on top of it, you can become overwhelmed. My dad hated weeding the garden, probably because it took up nearly the entire yard. He only did it a handful of times through the growing season, which made it a day-long endeavor. This inevitably gave me a skewed bias against what appeared to be back breaking work. More recently (summer 2024), while I was recovering from major abdominal surgery I unlocked the secret to me being able to manage the weeds in my garden. This sounds counterintuitive since I was supposed to be resting and healing, but I assure you that it did nothing but aid in that process.

We make our daily coffee in a French press, which means that I have to dispose of coffee grounds daily. The easiest way to clean out the press is to refill it with water and dump it, grounds and all. The best receptacle for this is the garden! So every day, mid morning, I would take my press out to the garden to dump that morning’s coffee grounds. While I was out there I would harvest anything that was ripe, often returning to the house with my press full again but this time it was full of fresh produce. While harvesting and pruning plants, I would discover some weeds and pull them up and before returning to the house I would deposit my handful of botanical invaders into my compost tumbler.

Rain water is best, if you don’t live in a place has rules against collecting it. When I first heard about this, I thought it was fallacy but after I looked into it, I realized that while it is not prohibited on a federal level there are some states in the West that don’t have as abundant of a water supply that require permits for harvesting rain water.

If you are curious about setting up a water catchment system this site has links to information about filtration, companies that sell supplies and full systems, as well as links to find information about if your state requires permits for the practice or prohibits it all together.

If you have to water your plants with city water, I recommend getting an inline filter like you would use for the plumbing on an RV. It screws into the spigot on the one end, and onto the hose on the other. I usually install mine at the start of the gardening season and replace it the following year… because while I prefer to utilize rain water, when we get into the REALLY hot months my rain barrels tend to run a little dry.

I don’t have a lot to say on the topic of fertilizer, other than to be aware that any chemicals that you feed to your vegetable or fruit producing plants, you are essentially feeding to yourself. The only fertilizer I use in my seed starting mix is worm castings, and while I wish I had a worm farm setup, I unfortunately have to purchase mine. For now.

When it comes to what goes into the garden, it is a mix of compost from my yard waste and kitchen scraps as well as some composted manure sourced from local garden centers or nurseries. I also have what I think of as composting ports in my garden where I pop open the top of a container that is mostly submerged in the dirt and dump in kitchen scraps for the worms and other insects to break down and distribute through the garden beds. These “ports” are just the covers for sprinkler system controls. In these ports I usually put kitchen scraps (vegetable waste), and I’ve even disposed of a moldy sourdough ferment…which my peppers evidently loved because I had a bumper crop of hot peppers in 2024.

This is one that I’m still working on a technique for. I have rain barrels that I set up every year and solar powered drip irrigation systems that I’ve been intending to set up since 2023 but I haven’t found the patience to map it out. Maybe this will be the year. But there is also something therapeutic about coming out to the garden and dipping my watering can in the rain barrels every morning to hand water and nurture my plants. It give me the opportunity to do some daily light weeding, prune the plants as needed, and check for pests in addition to harvesting any vegetables that might be ready. So maybe I won’t automate it.

I imagine that this is every gardener’s favorite part, though in reality its bitter sweet. Harvest for many of your typical garden vegetables comes as the growing season is coming to a close. Or at least that’s the case if you live in a region that gets frost or *GASP!* snow.

Things like leaf lettuce can be harvested throughout the growing season if you are only harvesting what you need on a day to day basis and have enough plants to allow for plants you have previously harvested from time to recover before you harvest again. Plants like tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers have a longer maturation period and start developing ripe fruits later in the summer. Tomatoes can be harvested as soon as they start to change from their initial green color to their final color, this is called first blush and at this point the fruiting body can be allowed to ripen on your kitchen counter instead of on the plant where it may be susceptible to pests.

Things like broccoli, kale, cabbage, and others in the brassica family are a bit more frost tolerant and can grow into the colder months. This period can be extended with the use of a cold frame, which is a structure that can be placed over the garden bed that allows the sunlight in, but keeps the frost out and somewhat insulates from the cold. I don’t have one of these yet, but I have plans to build one with some corrugated plastic sheets and PVC pipe. This can also be constructed with other materials like a wooden frame with a glass storm door as the roof.

Whether you freeze, can, dehydrate or freeze dry, if you have a surplus… there are so many interesting things you can make in an effort to preserve your harvest. My favorites are pickles, pickled hot peppers with the seeds removed, hot sauce, salsa, apple sauce, and apple butter. I’ve even started making a seasoning out of the dehydrated pulp leftover from making hot sauce… my boss is experimenting with using it as a garnish on deviled eggs!

I’ve also started canning broth. I use a lot of my vegetable kitchen scraps for vegetable stock, saving pepper caps, onion skins, carrot shavings, garlic skins, asparagus and a variety of other things in a gallon ziploc bag in my freezer. Once it is full I add it to a stock pot with 6 quarts of water and about a tablespoon of coarse sea salt and simmer it for 2 hours. I often pick lemon grass, rosemary, sage, and parsley from the garden to add to the broth if the garden is still in full swing. Or this year I harvested a bunch and added it to the freezer bag so I would have it ready for the next batch.

As another garden season gears up and things inevitably don’t go exactly to plan, I continue to learn from my mistakes and lucky coincidences. I’m by no means an expert in the field, but I am learning by doing, while I have the luxury of making mistakes.