How to be a good gardener

The Good Garden: How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard is a book brimming with tricks and tips for creating a sustainable garden. Chris McLaughlin, the author, is associate editor of Scratch Magazine, and has been gardening and studying plants for over 40 years, writing nine books along the way.

“We want to be able to balance having the things we planted, and still respect our ecosystem around us,” Chris told me on an episode of Inside Ideas. “The beauty of being small gardeners in our own yards is you get to control it all. You don’t have to destroy a thing, you get to regenerate things, you get to give back, you get to build more soil, you get to call in the pollinators that you want to pollinate your vegetables and fruits and everything else – you need all of that. Not harming that ecosystem is just as important as getting the food that you want, in fact you wouldn’t have the food if you harmed the ecosystem so the point is it all goes together and there are ways to make that happen.”

For more from the pages of The Good Garden catch up with Chris’s appearance on the podcast.