Gardening has become a hobby that we all really dig 😜 and with the official arrival of summer, there is still plenty of time for you to get in on the fun and satisfaction of growing your own food. 

As you’ll see from our personal plots, you don’t need a lot of space or big a time commitment to have thriving crops. Even a container in a windowsill can produce a lot of tasty herbs or microgreens that grow fast and make a nutritious addition to virtually any meal. 

One of the best guides out there for seeing what (and when) to plant in your local area is the Farmers’ Almanac. Both the planting calendar and gardening section are wonderful resources. Then for a more get-your-hands-dirty approach, the GrowVeg YouTube Channel has hours of tutorials, tips, and ingenious hacks.

Muriel

Our approach to backyard gardening has typically been to let the “volunteers” do as they may. We toss our scraps and occasional past-their-prime fruit and veggies into the compost and from that we’ve had five years of year-round perfect cocktail tomato plants, occasional squash, and this year, an apricot or peach tree that’s grown to over 6’. Can’t wait to find out what it is when it’s ready to flower and fruit! With the pandemic, we got homesteading fever along with everyone else and judiciously purchased spicy pepper seedlings. They’ve been getting all the water they need from our new greywater system and we’ve already started to pick purple jalapeños and are waiting for the apocalypse scorpion peppers, ghost peppers, and chocolate habaneros to be ready.

Roxy

My husband and I have lived in apartments together for a decade so we had always been restricted to small container and bucket gardening, but with the shut down in early March, we decided it was time to make some changes in the shared backyard with a go-ahead from our landlord. We and our neighbors ripped out plenty of decades-old spider-infested plants, tilled the soil with healthy new soil, leveled it, and created super quick planters. We have a variety of squash, tomatoes, herbs, corn, and berries growing so we there's lots to tend to and look forward to munching on while we enjoy the fresh air. We have exclusively bought all of our gardening tools, soil, and plants from Fig Earth Supply. They're a wonderful small nursery in Highland Park with an ever-changing selection of amazing affordable organic plants. 

Josh via Naya (7 yrs old):

Todd:

Barring a surprise plague of locusts, this is shaping up to be a banner season in our garden. My wife’s tomatoes have topped six feet tall, our beanstalks are growing like beanstalks, and I’m plucking golf ball-sized radishes out of the dirt every day. This is our fourth summer with a garden and the novelty of going outside and picking a salad for dinner shows no signs of wearing off.  Pill bugs (You might know them better as Roly Polys) have been the bane of my existence but I’ve been keeping them in check with potato traps and relocating them far away from our garden.