Just Grow Something | Evidence-Based Home Gardening

Cover Crops in the Home Garden - Ep. 318

Every empty bed in your garden is either growing something for you or growing weeds and losing topsoil. Cover crops are how you make sure it's the first one. In this epi

Fall-Planted vs. Spring-Planted Onions: Choosing the Right System for Your Garden - Ep. 317

Onions are having a moment in the seed catalogs right now, and a lot of that buzz is about overwintering them, tucking small transplants into the bed in September, lettin

Choosing a Garlic Variety Based on the Science - Ep. 316

It's the middle of summer, and I want you thinking about garlic. Not because it's time to plant, but because if you wait until it's time to plant, the good seed garlic ma

How to Know When Winter Squash is Ready to Harvest (and How to Store Them) - Ep. 315

Winter squash gives you almost no obvious warning before it's ready, and pulling it too early is one of the most common mistakes gardeners make. And that mistake costs yo

Who's Eating My Garden? Identifying and Deterring Common Backyard Wildlife - Ep. 314

Something has been eating your tomatoes, mowing your green beans down to nubs overnight, or turning your flower bed into a construction site, and you want to know who's r

Organic, Conventional, or Homegrown: What the Research Really Shows About Nutrition - Ep. 313

You've probably heard both sides of this argument: that organic and conventional produce are nutritionally identical, and that homegrown vegetables blow store-bought out

Why I Trust University Extension - Ep. 312

If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you've heard me point to University Extension again and again as my go-to source. But I've never actually explaine

The Science We Got Wrong: How Plant Research Rewrote the Rules for Gardening - Ep. 311

For most of the last century, gardeners were taught to cultivate their soil after every rain to conserve moisture, to think of plant roots as lone competitors, and to tre

The Mid-Season Soil Check - Ep. 310

Your garden is at its busiest in July, and so is the wear and tear on your soil. In this episode we get past the fertilizer conversation and into whether your soil is sti

Battling Blossom End Rot the Right Way - Ep. 309

If you've grown tomatoes or peppers for more than one season, you more than likely know the feeling been waiting that first tomato to ripen, finally see it’s blushing red

Heat Stress vs Drought Stress in the Vegetable Garden - Ep. 308

It's two o'clock on a July afternoon. You walk out to check the garden, and your squash leaves are drooping so low they're nearly touching the mulch. Your tomato plants l

How to Time Your Fall Brassicas - Ep. 307

Fall gardening doesn't start in September. For the crops that take a long time to produce, your broccoli, your cauliflower, your cabbage, your Brussels sprouts, it starts

Mid-Season Fertilizing: How to Know What Your Vegetables Actually Need - Ep. 306

It’s June, your tomatoes are climbing, your corn is waist-high, and the internet is full of fertilizing advice—most of it missing the most important variable: timing. In

Early Blight Versus Late Blight in Tomatoes: Don't Get This One Wrong! - Ep. 305

Every June, one of the most common questions that floods gardening groups, emails, and extension offices is some version of: “My tomato leaves are turning brown — do I ha

How to Manage Squash Vine Borer - Ep. 304

Every year, gardeners across the country watch their squash plants collapse overnight and have absolutely no idea why until it’s too late. The culprit is the squash vine

How to Identify and Manage Perennial Weeds (Without the Viral Sprays) - Ep. 303

Perennial weeds are in a different category than annuals. They don’t just re-seed, they regrow from the ground up, season after season, from root systems that can run thr

Mulch Matchmaking: Choosing the Right Mulch for Your Vegetable Garden - Ep. 302

Mulch is one of the highest-return investments you can make in your vegetable garden and yet most gardeners are using whatever happens to be available rather than whateve

Spring-Planted Bulbs and Summer Blooms: A Guide to Growing and Storing Dahlias, Gladiolus, and More - Ep. 301

A listener asked for a deep dive on dahlias and I’m delivering, from the ground up (pun intended). But we’re not stopping there. In this episode, I’m covering the full wo

Episode 300: The Questions You Keep Asking (and What the Research Actually Says)

We made it to 300 episodes! And to celebrate, I’m doing something a little different. I went looking for the questions home gardeners are asking most, the ones showing up

Topping Peppers: What does the science say, yay or nay? - Ep. 299

The subject of whether you should top your pepper plants can bring on a pretty strong debate among gardeners. That’s because this is one of those topics where the answer