Gardening Column Starts New Year’s Day 2018

Happy New Year! On this first day of 2018, a new gardening column will begin. It will detail every step in the planning, soil preparation, planting, care, and harvest of a bee-friendly vegetable garden.

Interviews with gardening experts, sourcing seeds, useful tools, best practices, managing the weeds without chemicals, battling toothy varmints both big and small, mishaps, milestones, and more, will be photographed and discussed.

A sizeable home garden plot that has been worked for more than 50 years is the project. It has produced peas, beans, corn, pumpkins, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and squash in its largest area, and strawberries and asparagus in a smaller patch have slowly dwindled. A newer section to the north has been haphazardly gardened for the past ten years. In November, with no time to manually prepare the garden for winter, a local landscaper tilled all three sections to prepare one unified garden for spring.

From winter’s nap to harvest, you are invited to learn the steps to planting a vegetable garden. January through March, we’ll methodically learn how to plan a garden, as it remains covered in snow. April and May, tips and discussions of prep work begin, and June to October, managing the growing season will guarantee frequent posts as issues and successes occur.

Please join me in this matter-of-fact adventure in gardening – a helpful and humorous undertaking in learning what works and what doesn’t in the journey to successfully growing one’s own food.

About the author…

Julie Ford is a freelance writer who lives in the Kalamazoo area with her husband, son, three cats, and a dachshund. She works full time in addition to writing for several publications. Family, writing, gardening, cooking, sewing, knitting, upcycling, crafting with nature, and skating are her main passions.

“As a reader of the Great Lakes Bee Supply website, you most likely love nature as much as I do. We are people who want to do right by bees, blissfully ‘toil in the soil,’ and reap what we sow whether is it beekeeping, herbs, flowers, fruits, or vegetables.”