How to Grow Anything: Food Gardening for Everyone

Get started right away! From sprouts and micro-greens to windowsill herb gardens and other edible container gardens, you can begin growing your own delicious foods any time of year. Discover the many benefits of growing your own fresh food, and learn what supplies you’ll need and how to arrange your plants.

Scope out your growing space. In this lesson, a wealth of inspiring ideas will show you what’s possible, whether you have a spacious suburban backyard or a city apartment. A few basic tips on spacing and designing your edible landscape will set you up for a successful growing season.

Every successful garden begins with a good foundation. Here, you’ll find out what makes an ideal soil composition, and you’ll learn several techniques for quickly repairing your soil and preparing your garden bed. The instructor’s own garden provides a case study you will follow throughout the course.

One of the best ways to extend your growing season is to start plants from seed indoors. Explore the materials and techniques for starting such common plants as tomatoes, peppers, melons, cabbage, and more from seeds. Tips for watering, lighting, and transplanting will ensure a successful migration to your outdoor garden.

Whether you start from seeds or buy young plants from your local nursery, vegetables and herbs are easy projects the whole family will love. See how to prep the soil and plant seeds for onions, corn, carrots, potatoes, and more. Then turn to transplanting and growing different types of tomatoes, peppers, and squash.

Consider ways to reduce your maintenance time and increase the success of your garden, no matter how busy your life may be. This lesson offers a blueprint for “low input” gardening, revealing time-saving strategies like proper weeding techniques, mulching for weed control and water conservation, and more.

For some gardeners, the shift from growing vegetables and herbs to growing fruits may be overwhelming, but in fact, the same basic maintenance and care principles apply: plant selection, soil prep, and pruning. To boost your confidence, this lesson provides some easy guidelines for growing small fruits, including strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, grapes, and more.

Once you’ve tackled vegetables and small fruits, moving to large fruit trees can be an exciting step. Because there are so many varieties available, from apples and peaches to pears and plums, Ms. Myers gives you some general guidelines for selecting and planting trees, as well as invaluable guidance on training and pruning your plants for greatest productivity.

When you grow your own food, you’ll likely tolerate a few more imperfections than you would with food from the grocery store. But you’ll still want to mitigate the harm from pests and diseases. Here, you’ll look at many of the most common pests and how to manage them in order to maximize your garden’s productivity.

All parts of gardening can be fun, but nothing beats harvesting the fruits of your labor. To boost your garden’s output, there are a few harvesting tricks you may want to consider. After reflecting on some differences between fruits and vegetables, learn about when to harvest many of the most common plants in the garden.

Plants come with a good bit of debris, including weeds and leaves and overripe fruit. Composting is a great way to turn those scraps back into organic matter for your garden. After going over the basic process—which is much easier than you might think—Ms. Myers builds a worm composter right in the studio.

No matter what part of the country you live in, the growing season inevitably will come to an end. To squeeze out a bit more yield from your garden, delve into several ways to protect your plants from frost. Explore cold frames, hot beds, greenhouses, and more, and then shift your attention to preserving your herbs over the winter.