Josie's Garden Chronicles: One Season of Starting Over

At Kelly's Kitchen, we talk a lot about growing your own food. This year, Josie Byzek put that to the test in a brand-new yard with partial sun, rocky soil, and a whole lot to figure out. Josie is an award-winning writer who has covered disability and accessibility for more than 20 years, and she’s been growing her own food her entire lifetime. This roundup pulls together all nine posts in Josie's Garden Chronicles from our Patreon, from the first empty container to the last handful of beans. For a richer experience, visit Patreon and support us by joining a paid tier.

Josie’s Garden Chronicles are part of Plant One More, our national gardening and produce donation program: grow one extra fruit or vegetable and share the harvest with your community.

•        Starting Over in the Garden - She traded a big, sunny yard for a smaller one with a few raised beds and containers. Here's where it all began.

•        Ground Prep - Why prepping your beds matters most, and how to get an in-ground bed ready to plant.

•        Pest Control - Bugs, bunnies, groundhogs, squirrels, deer, and the one thing that has ever actually kept the varmints out.

•        Cold Snaps, Western Exposure, and New Digs - A frost after Mother's Day, a yard that faces the wrong way, and the rise of Okra the Invincible.

•        Drowning my Container Garden - A rainy Pittsburgh May, mushrooms in my containers, clogged drainage holes, and the day poking at them was like turning on faucets.

•        Gardening mistakes were made, but it's not all bad news - I forgot the sun moves between February and June, picked moisture-hungry dirt for the rainiest spring in memory, and got told to replace it all. I went for perlite instead.

•        Defeating Fungus Gnats - How Mosquito Bits tea finally cleared the fungus gnats out of my deck containers.

•        Scary Bugs are Sometimes Heroes - Paper wasps showed up to eat the pests on my broccoli, and I let them stay.

•        Harvest Time - Five hours of sun, sinking soil, and enough beans and herbs to share. What I learned and what I'll do differently next year.