Starting a garden can be a deeply personal, and remedial experience; a way of nurturing the land and ourselves.

Acknowledge the land, and the indigenous people who tended and nurtured the land before you. Acknowledge the trees, plants, birds, critters and other organisms, who are tending the land alongside you, allow them their space and place in this process.

Want a quicker overview on gardening? Scroll down to the bottom of the page to view our slides!

When to Start:

The best time to start gardening is yesterday — meaning, there is never a bad-time to start as a beginner — of course, good weather helps, but starting inside with a few plants: mints, basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, thyme, etc, during the winter-months, can provide enough insight and experience before spring. And by spring, you’ll feel prepared and confident about expanding towards growing outside, be it, the balcony, the yard, or the front-steps of your home.

We created a Site Analysis Sheet to help you get started! Click here!

Types of Gardens:

Food-Garden: A garden dedicated to growing edible plants such as greens, herbs, fruits, or vegetable — even flowers, if they’re edible.

Easy Plants to Start:

Beans: Beans are considered the easiest vegetable to grow; beans fix nitrogen into the soil, through a symbiotic-relationship with Rhizobium bacteria, and depending on how fertile your soil is, beans can be exactly what you need to remediate your soil.

Greens: Growing spinach and arugula can be as low-maintenance as: sowing seeds outside inside a milk-jug towards the end of winter, and harvesting during the spring. This method is called winter-sowing.

Permaculture-gardens are a sustainable alternative to gardening which promotes ecological-balance. Practices include: companion-planting, sowing perennial-plants such as: wild-flowers, or shrubs. As well as avoiding the use of insecticides and fungicides.

Habitat-Garden: A garden dedicated to creating habitats for pollinators, birds, critter, and other organisms.

Pollinator-Garden: Native-plants such as: Showy Goldenrods, Common Milkweed, and New England Asters, provide resources (pollen, leaves,) and food (nectar,) for native-bees, wasps, butterflies, hummingbirds, and various other pollinators.

Bird-Garden: A garden intended to attract birds by growing plants which will harbor an ecosystem desirable to birds, such as planting native-trees (Redbud, Sweetbay Magnolia, Flowering Dogwood,) and native fruit-bearing plants (Pokeweeds, Elderberries, Chokeberries).

Wildlife-Garden: Wildlife-gardens are intended to attract a specific, or a range of critters, either native-insects, rabbits, chipmunks, even reptiles and amphibians.

Growing and preparing Marigold-seedlings inside the greenhouse before spring.

Beans growing in our backyard 3-summers ago, after harvesting the second-year, the soil was noticeably more fertile.

Rain-Garden: A garden intended to mimic the natural-water-cycle and act as bio-retentions to help manage stormwater runoffs, or rain. Other benefits of rain-gardens include: an increase in soil-infiltration, lessening of soil-erosion, and a decrease in air-temperature.

Bioswales: Channels of vegetation reducing the amount of stormwater runoffs, or filtering stormwater runoffs of debris, or pollutants before entering storm-drains alongside sidewalks.

Rain-Garden: If a certain area of your yard floods, or accumulate large amounts of water, plant certain native-vegetation which acclimate, or thrive with “wet-feet” such as: Marsh Marigold, Elderberry, Marsh Milkweed, New England Aster, Giant Hyssop, and Switchgrass.

Soil & Growing Conditions:

Fungi are your friends, as well as you plant’s friends. Avoid the use of insecticide and fungicides: a healthy garden thrives in microorganism-rich and mycelium-rich soils.

Different plants, different soils — research your plant’s favorite soil-type to ensure your plants thrive!

We created a Site-Analysis Sheet here, which provides in-depth information on ensuring the best growing-conditions outside.

Soil-Types: Loam, Sandy Loam, Silt Loam, Clay Loam — feel and examine the soil in your yard, it is thick, like clay? Is it dark-brown, and soft? Is it grainy? Does water infiltrate easily into soil?

Soil pH: Acidic, Slightly Acidic, Neutral, Alkaline — pH test-kits can be a quick way of determined your soil’s pH. Blueberries enjoy acidic-soils, chokeberries enjoy slightly acidic soils, and most wild-flowers enjoy a range between slightly acidic to neutral soils.

Soil-Activity: Is your soil high in microorganisms (worms, tiny little critters) — are there any mycelial (fungal) activities? It is essential to feed the soil to encourage microorganisms to thrive e.g., composting, mycorrhizal inoculum, mulching, and allowing leaf-litter to decompose in the soil.

Sunlight: Pay attention to where the sun rises and sets in your location. In Boston, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Be attentive to what areas in your garden which receives the most exposure to sunlight and shade.

Attached below are informational-slides providing additional in-depth guides and information on gardening.

To view: swipe, or click the buttons on the right or left of the slides.