About

We focus on how to garden, and particularly on the benefits of Productive Gardening. We write weekly about our own 'trial and error' experiences, and we also write about several other topics, including: water usage & conservation; detailed explanations, pictures, & growing information on plants for vegetable gardens & plants that attract pollinators; mulching and composting; permaculture and food forests; & a whole lot more.
Our slogan is "Gardening for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". Our target audience are those who want to learn to produce healthy food in abundance in their gardens, and preserve and store it with an aim of self-sufficiency.

We started our blog primarily because we love to garden, and we know a lot about gardening and healthy food. (John has a Bachelor's in Horticulture and a Master's in Agriculture; Anni has a Bachelor's in Dietetics and Human Nutrition.)

We've kept going with our blog because of what we continually discover about the food industry and food supply system in America. There is so much that we feel is wrong or misguided: the billion-dollar yearly subsidies from the government; the ingredients used in a lot of foods (additives, preservatives, 'manufacturing aids', etc.); the pesticides, fungicides, insecticides, etc that are used on farms, sometimes just hours before food is harvested and shipped to the market; the vegetable and fruit varieties that are being grown for the supermarket are hard and flavorless and a lot of it is picked early and then treated with ripening hormones at the store or warehouse; the meat industry is appalling and we believe a lot of the practices used in farming animals is wrong, from factory farms to feed lots, including dairy cows, egg-laying chickens, and animals produced solely for meat; and the problem of land becoming poorer and more depleted each year instead of being improved (desertification & salt accumulation) because of the mismanagement of water and other resources, leading to loss of water from rain runoff, which also carries away topsoil and nutrients every year.

We teach as much as we can on our blog, through what we know, and what we learn ourselves through our own experiences. Because we believe that if people were to grow a garden, no matter how large or small, it will immediately bring benefits to their lives and the lives of their children. These benefits include improved nutritional benefits, healthier food, more flavorful food, added fulfillment from gardening, and the learning and resilience a person inevitably develops when growing a garden.  Not to mention the improvement of land, air, environment and wildlife habitats.

There are many principles and people we've learned from: Permaculture (Bill Mollison, Geoff Lawton, and others); Garden Design and Appreciation (Monty Don, Alan Titchmarsh, and others); Productive Gardening (Alys Fowler, Monty Don, Willy Galloway, and others); Companion Planting; Potagers; Kitchen Gardens; Food Forests; Water Harvesting, Usage, and Conservation; Mulching and Soil Retention......

And now we want to pay it forward. No matter how much work it takes to reach our audience and to help people, we're writing and reaching out, both online and in our community. We love it when our interactions turn into conversations and friendships, either in person or through the mediums of social media.