Food Garden Life Show: Helping You Harvest More from Your Edible Garden, Vegetable Garden, and Edible Landscaping

We continue our cross-Canada tour, chatting with inspiring gardeners to hear about favourite varieties and top crops. Today we head to Regina, Saskatchewan, to chat with Candace Benson, who runs City Street Farms. Candace tells us about how she turns grass into gardens in a city that has a lot of single-family homes—and a lot of front lawns. She shares the story of her business, talks about her process to transform a lawn into a garden, and then talks about favourite veg and flower varieties. You can find Candace online, at citystreetfarms.ca

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Join the 5,000+ gardeners in The Food Garden Gang who stay on top of home food-growing ideas with our weekly e-mail. We’re making the world a better place one garden at a time!
Grab the free e-book: Small-Space Food-Gardening Hacks.
Find out more about the Canada Gardener’s Journal: It’s a gardening journal, gardening log, and garden planner—with an all-Canadian sources list.

Today we’re joined by Helen Battersby, who talks about a gardening book that began as a coping tool. Helen tells us about Margaret Bennet-Alder, who turned to gardening during a difficult family chapter. Inspired by the homemade booklets her son used to manage appointments and medication while rebuilding his life, Margaret began tracking her garden the same way—seasonal tasks, plant sources, and hard-earned gardening lessons. The book, the Toronto Gardener’s Journal, was a shared project with her son. They started with 50 copies. Margaret and her son, and, later, sisters Helen and Sarah Battersby, grew the book into a nationally loved resource, with over 20,000 journals sold across Canada. This is a story about gardens—but also about resilience, care, and the healing power of gardening.

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Join the 5,000+ gardeners in The Food Garden Gang who stay on top of home food-growing ideas with our weekly e-mail. We’re making the world a better place one garden at a time!
Grab the free e-book: Small-Space Food-Gardening Hacks.
Find out more about the Canada Gardener’s Journal: It’s a gardening journal, gardening log, and garden planner—with an all-Canadian sources list.

We continue our cross-Canada tour, chatting with inspiring gardeners to find out favourite varieties and top crops.
 
Today we chat with Niki Jabbour, a CBC radio gardening expert, one of the creators behind the gardening website savvygardening.com, and the award-winning author of The Year Round Vegetable Gardener, Groundbreaking Food Gardens: 73 Plans That Will Change the Way You Grow Your Garden, Veggie Garden Remix: 224 New Plants to Shake Up Your Garden and Add Variety, Flavor, and Fun, and Growing Under Cover: Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant, Pest-Free Vegetable Garden.
Niki shares some of her long-time favourite veg varieties, more recent additions to her favourites list, and some varieties with a Canadian pedigree. (Spoiler alert: including one that’s listed in the Slow Fook Ark of Taste.) 

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Join the 5,000+ gardeners in The Food Garden Gang who stay on top of home food-growing ideas with our weekly e-mail. We’re making the world a better place one garden at a time!
Grab the free e-book: Small-Space Food-Gardening Hacks.
Find out more about the Canada Gardener’s Journal: It’s a gardening journal, gardening log, and garden planner—with an all-Canadian sources list.

We continue our cross-Canada tour of inspiring gardeners to find out favourite varieties and top crops.
Today we chat with Dave Hanson, co-host of The Grow Guide podcast, and owner of Sage Garden Greenhouses in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Dave shares some of his favourite veg varieties. He also talks about top herbs, one of his specialties.
Lavender get smoked in a harsh winter? Dave has a suggestion. And if you just can’t get enough cucs, hear what he does.

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Join the 5,000+ gardeners in The Food Garden Gang who stay on top of home food-growing ideas with our weekly e-mail. We’re making the world a better place one garden at a time!
Grab the free e-book: Small-Space Food-Gardening Hacks.
Find out more about the Canada Gardener’s Journal: It’s a gardening journal, gardening log, and garden planner—with an all-Canadian sources list.

Leafy greens always seem to bolt too quickly? Can’t figure out why your broccoli isn’t forming heads? Choosing vegetable varieties suited to your climate helps avoid these sorts of frustrations.
In this episode, we get variety recommendations from gardening expert and entomologist Linda Gilkeson. Having spent much of her career on programs to reduce pesticide use, Linda is also an avid organic gardener who can garden year-round in her coastal climate.
Her books include Backyard Bounty: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest and West Coast Gardening: Natural Insect, Weed and Disease Control.
Linda gardens on Salt Spring Island, one of the Gulf Islands off the coast of British Columbia. She describes her growing conditions as coastal Pacific Northwest. Her variety recommendations are for these conditions.
But even if you’re not in the Pacific Northwest, I suggest you tune in. You’ll hear about tomato varieties that produce when it’s too cold for most others to set fruit. Did you know there are three broad groups of broccoli? And get Linda’s vegetable gardening words of wisdom.
Click here to see Linda’s list of top vegetable varieties.
Find Linda online at lindagilkeson.ca
If you’re looking for sources and tips about ordering vegetable seed, check out the post about where to get vegetable seed.  

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Join the 5,000+ gardeners in The Food Garden Gang who stay on top of home food-growing ideas with our weekly e-mail. We’re making the world a better place one garden at a time!
Grab the free e-book: Small-Space Food-Gardening Hacks.
Find out more about the Canada Gardener’s Journal: It’s a gardening journal, gardening log, and garden planner—with an all-Canadian sources list.