Starting your own garden to grow healthy food is a fairly simple task

Growing your own produce is one way of having a source for healthy food, and it’s easy for most people to get started.

Samaritan Ministries member Brendan Riordan of Homestead Food Gardens offers some simple advice for new gardeners to help them:

1. Plan your harvest. “Grow what you like to eat,” Brendan said. “Of course, you should also make sure it grows where you live. You could look online for your growing zone and seasons—what to plant, when to plant, and when to harvest.”
2. Use a sterile planting mix if you start your plants inside. Such mixes don’t come with eggs of bugs or diseases, which you may get if you start seeds in soil brought in from your garden.
3. Fertilize properly. Brendan recommended an organic fertilizer like Espoma, but he also encourages the use of ground cover like wood chips. “After a year, earthworms and bacteria start breaking down the wood chips and then the garden starts making its own ecosystem,” Brendan said.
4. Choose easy-to-grow plants. Super Sweet 100 Cherry Tomato, for instance, is a good producer and available through many seed catalogues. “You’re going to get hundreds of tomatoes,” Brendan said. “Bush beans are also easy to grow.” He also suggested sweet potatoes but cautioned that “they really do need a lot of space.”
5. Monitor your garden daily for disease, pests, and dryness. “You’re going to get some pressure from insects or diseases, but 80% of them can be handled without having to spray or use chemicals,” Brendan said. “Look under the leaves, see if there’s any bugs or if disease is developing. Most of the time you can handle them by either picking off the diseased leaf or picking off the insects. For everything else, try to use natural remedies, like a spray made from garlic and soapy water. And buy seeds of plants that are disease- and insect-resistant.” And, he added, “water away when the soil needs it.”
6. Finally, weed, weed, weed. “The biggest challenge everybody has is weeding,” he said. To reduce the amount of weed-pulling, “Cover the soil in woodchips or thick weed fabric.”

Brendan is offering garden consultations through live coaching calls and is willing to do group rates for Zoom calls with five to 10 people for $50 per person. You can contact him at [email protected].