If you are a city dwellers who wishes to garden to create beautiful, public green spaces for all you can volunteer with COGdesign (Community Outreach Group for Landscape Design).Talented landscape designers work pro bono with neighborhood groups who have spaces in their neighborhoods that need to be reclaimed. By restoring spaces we build gardens and in the process help create stronger communities. We are always looking for volunteers. Please visit the website at http://www.cogdesign.org and see over 90 projects completed over the last ten years.

As a social worker and gardener, I’ve found a way to combine the two. I’m a volunteer with COGDesign. A non-profit that designs gardens in under-served areas in the city and beyond. Build a beautiful garden and people will come. Keep it beautiful, and people will help. Gardens foster pleasure and peace. A great way to build community.

Hi Tom,

Could you ask your guest what advice she’d give someone who wants to start a garden (flower or vegetable) but has no idea how to do so? What resources are available to learn how to get started (and which are not too complicated)?

For all that your guest loves her garden, it seems like the relationship is a bit adversarial. I hear “It’s just too much” and “I can’t keep up” an awful lot.
I love my garden, but the best way to garden is to work WITH the natural tendencies of your plants, rather than against them. You can’t “keep up” with nature if you’re working against it.

i would love to hear your thoughts on forest gardens. i have several acres of heavy mixed pine and hardwood forest and would love to work with a portion of it harmoniously.

3 comments – Weeding gives one a great sense of POWER!! I decide who lives and dies in my own little sphere! I am continually in awe of the clever way that weeds grow right next to a valued plant and immitate its appearance in order to sneak by, which happens all too often. Lastly, a person’s garden is an accurate reflection of one’s personality! My garden clearly illustrates that I am NOT at all anal, I am slightly ADD, and I am in fact quite merciful in what I allow to live in my garden!

Gardening is history, love, science, art. I don’t cut down the half-eaten viburnum because a beloved family dog chewed it. I have the Jurassic Park-like lilacs that I don’t trim ’cause a mother-in-law gave these as “sticks” 12 years ago as my house-warming gift. Every Mother’s Day gift. An established gardener gardens for free by dividing and trading. Peace and curiosity satiated by frequent observations. Cool bugs. The work of gardening keeps me fit.

Gardening is very much like aging cheese and raising children.

I have a 30′ x 30′ vegetable garden. Nothing makes me happier than in August when everything is ripening, the garden is cleaned up, bees, dragonflies, birds, an occasional leopard frog & garter snake keep me company. I look around and feel truly at peace.

Even in the dead of winter, I know this August moment will come, right as rain. Patience is something you learn as a gardener.

Stamford, CT
The Farm at Big Yellow

I am 58, been gardening 40 years since I was 18 and borrowed a back yard in Brooklyn to teach myself veggie gardening while I lived in a 6th floor apt.
Now I am in the 6th home since, near New Haven, where I have had to start over each time to get good vegetables.
I may have left plant problems behind, but I have encountered and handled many from my predecessors as well.
I have not had the chance to enjoy the grapes, asparagus or fruits I had planted at past homes for long term enjoyment, but they are a legacy I hope the new owners can enjoy.
What keeps me going is the quality and difference of taste in what I grow versus the imported industrialized foods in the market.

I have been gardening where ever I have lived. When I had an attic apartment I had pots of herbs and veggies and flowers on the little deck next to the door. Now we have just less than an acre, and I’m adding to our vegetable beds. I gardened with my Dad, and my husband with his mother. My five year-old just asked if he could have his own spot to plant things, and I am so pleased! Gardening may not be genetic, but I do think it’s contagious.

I’m a south Florida gardener and yes, it has gotten away from me from time to time. Down here that means rampant over-growth in a matter of a month or two!!!

I’m now simplifying and like Sydney, going to shrubs and small flowering trees. All the texture, loads of flowers and much less hands-on. I still have a small herb garden and in the winter months a small vegetable garden. I had a koi pond in my old yard but not this time around. In south Florida creating shade is a must but you can start with a relatively small tree knowing it will only take a year or 2 to see results.

Life is good!!

and watched it die…. I meant to say.

My wife and I bought our first house 6 years ago – new construction with compacted clay soil from all the truck traffic. I spent 3 years and thousands of dollars trying to make grass grow along a 3000 square foot area that barely gets 6 hours of sun a day. Other areas I’ve planted various plants, herbs, perennials, trees, flowers, etc. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it but now with our 2 year old boy every cent and second have been made worthwhile when I watch him run around the lawn, and smell the herbs and mint. My compost has finally matured and the soil is good enough that I plan to plant vegetables with him. The garden through the eyes of a child is priceless and I hope he grows to enjoy gardening, the outdoors, and respect for nature.

Regarding the English reluctance to use the word “Yard” While living in the U.K. several years ago I was frequently admonished for using “yard” instead of garden, as “yard” denoted the compost-y scrubby parts.

When a British friend visted us in the Midwest in summer (and following in a garden walk) she was appalled that we had such a small variety of plants (“everything is gernaniums and impatiens”) until she realized that we actually had WINTER here! We had a serious discussion as to whether gardening was harder in the Midwest vs. UK (friendhsip remained intact, however)

Regarding liking bugs – as a preschool teacher I used to host a “field trip for bugs,” I would dig up a patch of dirt from my home garden and bring it into school along with gloves, little shovels, etc. and tell the children in my class that these bugs’ parents let them come into school on a field trip so that the kids could ‘meet’ them… the kids got so much out of it, those who might have been scared were not when the idea of getting to know them was presented this way.
It even changed my perspective and I find I am not too scared of crawly things now.

Great show!

Right now I am in the 2nd year of establishing a garden which covers about 1/3 of my side yard. I am still moving plants in, but also allowing some of the volunteers (weeds, wildflowers)to add to the mix. Eventually I will only weed out the grass and keep the wildflowers from being invasive, so that the mix of wild and cultivated plants combines and continues.
And every time I plant anything, I tell it that I will give it the care/location it needs, but it is responsible for thriving…and it can be replaced for under $5.

Great topic.

I have had moderate success growing a garden on my small porch using plant containers, but if I missed even one day of watering some plants began to wither and a few died. Harvest included tomatoes, basil, carrots, dill, and lettuce.

A community garden is a good way to get started, especially for people who lack the space or who may enjoy working with more experienced gardeners. I live in an apartment so I joined the town’s community garden project. I now have a small garden to tend. Some folks and I spent some time looking for two sunny and easily accessible areas, a church and the town accepted the plans, a few meetings later we formed a garden committee, and yesterday we staked out plots.

One of the strangest gardens I’ve seen was in the country, where a friend tilled up an acre plot. After planting, half of it was allowed to go wild, after the seeds were sowed, partly because the other half took too much time to keep weed free but also because she felt interested in seeing how the plants grew when weeds were allowed to grow and compete with the herbs and vegetables. Beans and peas climbed all over the tall grass. The harvest was like a treasure hunt trying to find the food in the thick of the wild plants. She also allowed wild animals into the untamed garden area. From her kitchen window she can see the garden and she has great stories of morning sightings of deer, moose, and smaller animals visiting the site.

For people with the problems MMS started with – look into raised beds. A lot of plants only need a few inches of depth. They can be as simple and easy as 2x4s or 2x6s nailed together in a square or rectangular shape. Assuming you can get to all sides of them, make them no more them 4′ wide so you can reach everywhere inside. You don’t want to walk in the garden, the paths are the spaces between the raised beds. If you are planting vegetables DO NOT use pressure treated wood! Dig out whatever is growing in the space, you don’t want the grass and weeds growing up through your garden – and they WILL.

If there is a garden center nearby, have them deliver the proper amount of compost. They sell it by the cubic yard. You don’t want top soil, don’t need a lot of expensive bags of planting mix.

Also look into the Square Foot Gardening method. If you have a small garden, you can get more plants per square foot than in a large garden you walk through.

Hi Julie who asked about aggressive groundcovers:

I love sweet woodruff (gallium odorata) and lamium. Lamium flowers all summer; sweet woodruff has white flowers in spring. They will spread and mingle in a delightful way. I also use ivy, which is not for the timid, but I have a lot of trees.

Ajuga is also wonderful, but could be a bit more aggressive.

I hope you are still checking the comments.

For everyone that wants a garden boost this summer, please visit Garden Walk Buffalo! Elizabeth Licata is one of the many that help this event happen. It’s the largest garden tour in the country (more than 300 gardens!), with spectacular urban gardens, that attracts between 45,000 and 50,000 people from around the U.S. and Canada. http://gardenwalkbuffalo.com/

Also this year there will be five weeks of garden walks, talks tours and more happening before Garden Walk Buffalo. In addition there will be garden-themed tours, a front yard garden competition, philharmonic concerts, and more! Visit http://www.NationalGardenFestival.com ( http://www.nationalgardenfestival.com/ )

Loved this show! I am 54 and have been working in the dirt as long as I can remember. My Grandparents were farmers in CT – my Dad did not like farm work but always had gardens around the house. My Mom’s Dad who passed before I was born always grew Vegetables- so I guess it’s in the blood. I live in FL 23 yrs now, and have tried to grow “northern” plants here – got frustrated. The past 5 years or so I have been going native and I have been incorporating edible landscaping into my small 80×125 lot. I do container gardening etc.
Much more satisfying than trying to force something to grow where it shouldn’t. If you are ever in SW FL Visit
ECHO Farm – You will be fascinated and come away w/ Tons of ideas. Gardening is therapy for me!