Soil & Strategy: The Two Garden Planning Secrets for Bigger, Healthier Harvests

Growing Joy with Plants - Wellness Rooted in Nature, Houseplants, Gardening and Plant Care

Maria Failla- Happy Plant Lady and Author of Growing Joy: The Plant Lover's Guide to Cultivating Happiness

Education, How To, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Home & Garden, Leisure

4.8 • 883 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do you plan your garden? Actually, do you plan your gardens at all? After many years of gardening and speaking with many garden experts, I learned that a successful organic vegetable garden doesn’t just happen when you plant it; it starts on the day you plan it.

In this episode, I have the perfect recurring guest, Joe Lamp'l, to discuss planning your garden for the year ahead and making sure 2025 is your best gardening season yet. Joe is the founder of Joe Gardener and creator of many digital gardening courses I've taken, including Organic Vegetable Gardening Course (discount applied at checkout through clicking the link!).

In this episode, we learn:

[01:14] What is strategic garden planning?
[04:11] How can we make 2025 the greatest gardening season yet?
[08:02] Timing for starting seeds/seedlings & plant selection
[15:01] Whitney Johnson’s book “Go Forth and Forage"
[16:09] What are the most important aspects of garden planning?
[19:54] Why soil health is important
[22:33] How to improve soil health
[25:58] What are some useful garden planning tools?
[17:17] How to choose the right plants
[29:48] What is biodiverse gardening?
[31:37] Helpful local botanical centers
[34:48] What is companion planting?
[41:32] Joe’s Organic Vegetable Gardening Course

Mentioned in our conversation:

Organic Vegetable Gardening Course (Discount applied at checkout through clicking the link!)
Master Seed Starting Course
Northwest Flower & Garden Show
Xerces Society
Missouri Botanical Garden
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
Giverny Gardens
Chattahoochee Nature Center
Plant Partners: Science-Based Companion Planting Strategies for the Vegetable Garden by Jessica Walliser
GJ Episode 20: Talking Tomatoes with Craig LeHoullier and My MOM

For Joe's proven and tested gardening strategies,

check out the full show notes and blog here!

Follow Joe:

Thank you to our episode sponsor:

Quarto: Go Forth and Forage by Whitney Johnson

Grab yourself a copy of Go Forth and Forage: A Guide to Foraging Over 50 of the Most Common Edible & Medicinal North American Mushrooms by Whitney Johnson at your local bookstore, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, quarto.com, or amazon.com.

Follow Maria and Growing Joy:

Order my book: Growing Joy: The Plant Lover's Guide to Cultivating Happiness (and Plants) by Maria Failla, Illustrated by Samantha Leung

Join the Bloom and Grow Garden Party Community Platform & App AKA the plantiest and kindest corner of the internet! Get your FREE 2-week trial here!

Take the Plant Parent Personality Quiz (Get the perfect plants, projects and educational resources for YOUR Lifestyle)

Support Bloom and Grow Radio by becoming a Plant Friend on Patreon!

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, plant friend, quick announcement at the top of the show. I wanted to let you know I'm offering two
0:04.6	different free online classes that are 45 minutes each that are designed to help you get the most
0:11.7	out of your spring this year. I want spring and summer 2025 to be your best house plant growth
0:19.0	seasons yet. And the way that you'll sign up for these classes,
0:22.7	which are completely free, is by going to Growingjoy with Maria.com slash class. There's two options.
0:29.4	The first up is the spring house plant boost, supercharge your plant growth in three simple steps,
0:34.9	and this is a 45-minute class all about how to utilize spring
0:39.3	to set your plants up for insane growth this year. And then the second class is called the
0:44.8	ultimate guide to moving indoor plants outside and three mistakes to avoid. A lot of people
0:49.9	move their plants outside in the spring, which is fabulous, but there are massive mistakes you
0:54.1	can do that can result in some pretty bad stuff. So this class is going to go over how to do that.
0:58.7	If you're interested in either classes or both classes, you can go register for free, completely
1:04.7	free. Each class is 45 minutes at Growingjoy with Maria.com slash class. That's Growingjoy with Maria.com slash class.
1:13.1	I cannot wait to hang out with you live and share my tips.
1:23.2	So after several years of gardening myself and speaking to so many professional gardeners, I have learned that a thriving organic vegetable garden does not start the day you plant it.
1:34.6	It starts the day you plan it.
1:36.9	So today I have the perfect guest to talk all about planning your garden this year.
1:42.3	So 2025 is your best gardening season yet.
1:50.8	Welcome to the Growing Joy with Plants podcast, where we not only learn how to care for plants
1:57.6	successfully, but how to simply and affordably use our plant babies to
2:01.3	cultivate more joy in our lives by doing so. I'm Maria, former plant killer turned happy plant
2:07.1	lady, author of Growing Joy, The Plant Lover's Guide to Cultivating Happiness, Speaker, Podcaster,
	...

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