Hey there. Do you enjoy doing experiments in your garden? Well, if you've been around here any length of time, you know that I absolutely do.

I never intended to use my garden as a laboratory, testing various plants, growing media, conditions, and other gardening methods.

But it happened. I'm not sure if this is due to my natural curious nature and how I was

drawn to the subject of testing and research as a college student, or if all gardeners develop a

natural bent for this kind of learning. I kind of think it's the latter. Regardless, I think it's

important to learn and understand some basic concepts of experimentation

in our garden to help us best use that information for future decisions and even future tests.

In today's episode, I'm going to talk to you about how we as everyday gardeners can take something

as complex as scientific experimentation and make

it doable, fun, and ultimately useful. Nobody's going to be peer reviewing your experiments.

This is all for you and for developing better tactics and methods in order to produce better

results. I believe the best and most

accurate learning will ever do is in our own gardens, not in gardening books and not even in

listening to podcasts like this one. So if your own garden is your own best education in gardening, let's talk about how to actually do

some of this testing in a fun way so that it can inform our future decisions and make us better

gardeners. Today, let's explore how to do this. And as an example, I'm going to share with you how this has been playing out in my own garden

as I've been testing every year the most popular vegetable in the home garden.

Tomatoes.

And be sure to stay to the end because you'll be getting an exciting preview of what's to come

in the podcast from now to the end of the year.

Welcome. I'm Jill, and in 2013, I started my first garden as a new stay-at-home mom wanting to do

my part to provide for my family. Over the years, I stumbled my way into becoming a gardener,

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