Soil & Strategy: The Two Garden Planning Secrets for Bigger, Healthier Harvests

How do you plan your garden? Actually, do you plan your gardens at all? After many years of gardening and speaking with many garden experts, I learned that a successful organic vegetable garden doesn’t just happen when you plant it; it starts on the day you plan it.

In this episode, I have the perfect recurring guest, Joe Lamp'l, to discuss planning your garden for the year ahead and making sure 2025 is your best gardening season yet. Joe is the founder of Joe Gardener and creator of many digital gardening courses I've taken, including Organic Vegetable Gardening Course (discount applied at checkout through clicking the link!).

In this episode, we learn:

• [01:14] What is strategic garden planning?
• [04:11] How can we make 2025 the greatest gardening season yet?
• [08:02] Timing for starting seeds/seedlings & plant selection
• [15:01] Whitney Johnson’s book “Go Forth and Forage"
• [16:09] What are the most important aspects of garden planning?
• [19:54] Why soil health is important
• [22:33] How to improve soil health
• [25:58] What are some useful garden planning tools?
• [17:17] How to choose the right plants
• [29:48] What is biodiverse gardening?
• [31:37] Helpful local botanical centers
• [34:48] What is companion planting?
• [41:32] Joe’s Organic Vegetable Gardening Course

Mentioned in our conversation:

• Organic Vegetable Gardening Course (Discount applied at checkout through clicking the link!)
• Master Seed Starting Course
• Northwest Flower & Garden Show
• Xerces Society
• Missouri Botanical Garden
• Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
• Giverny Gardens
• Chattahoochee Nature Center
• Plant Partners: Science-Based Companion Planting Strategies for the Vegetable Garden by Jessica Walliser
• GJ Episode 20: Talking Tomatoes with Craig LeHoullier and My MOM

For Joe's proven and tested gardening strategies,

check out the full show notes and blog here!

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Thank you to our episode sponsor:

Quarto: Go Forth and Forage by Whitney Johnson

Grab yourself a copy of Go Forth and Forage: A Guide to Foraging Over 50 of the Most Common Edible & Medicinal North American Mushrooms by Whitney Johnson at your local bookstore, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, quarto.com, or amazon.com.

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