Learn how to become a good gardener

My guest today on Inside Ideas, the wonderful Chris McLaughlin, is your goto person for anything and everything relating to gardening. Her latest book: The Good Garden: How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard, is the perfect guide for the green fingered, as well as those twiddling in that direction.

The associate editor for From Scratch Magazine, Chris has been gardening and studying plants for over forty years, writing nine books along the way, with her latest brimming with all the tricks and tips you will need to grow the sustainable garden of your dreams.

“I am about putting the power back in your hands,” Chris says. “When people grow some food they plant the seed, nurture it and it grows, and they harvest it and they put it on the table and are feeding their family. This is a whole different thing to going out and bringing home the bacon and frying it up and it’s very empowering. What happens is when you get that empowered feeling it spills into the rest of your life, that’s really how I’ve always looked at it. It makes you feel like, my gosh I literally fed my family. You can do anything if you can do that.”

The master gardener and modern homesteader is amplifying a truth that has found its voice in the winds of the pandemic: that people desperately want to reconnect with nature and in a way that gives back to the environment.

“We want to be able to balance having the things we planted, and still respect our ecosystem around us,” adds Chris. “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.”

Join Chris and me on a journey into the garden on today’s show to learn more.