Tag: gardens

Changing It Up In The Garden

Posted on by Rachel Lonas

The raised bed at my house has been frustrating me. Each season I keep amending the soil only to find it going back to root balls and compact soil. This fall I have decided I have agency, and am going to completely redo the bed…into containers.

Normally, I wouldn’t go through the hassle since I have so little margin already with my time, but a fortuitous (but also sad) thing happened this month — our local horticulture supply store decided to close its doors forever and mark everything 50 percent off. So I went a little crazy (more on that in a minute) and one of the purchases was something I had never tried before — very inexpensive grow bags that have holes pre-punched in the bottom.

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I bought them in various gallon sizes and while I also obviously plan to use them for Maple Key, I have other places I can share the love of gardening such as the library I work at or the homeschool tutorial my children go to.

As you can see, I am still growing spindly, but producing okra right now, so I am doing the bed bit by bit. I am taking the compact, dusty soil (that’s partly my bad!) and putting it in a paint bucket, adding homemade compost and vermiculite to provide nutrients, good bacteria, and aeration for the soil. Then, I dish it back out in each bag.

I really think this is going to be much easier to manage than what I had been doing and it’s just one more reminder that you can always change what you’re doing in gardening if it’s not working for you! Nothing about gardening is locked in, so do what’s best for your season of life and environment.

Now onto my big purchase…!

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The other big change I am trying this year (again, thanks to the going-out-of-business sale) is vertical gardening. I bought a GreenStalk 7 tier planter with a bottom spinner! I was already excited about it (less pests, less bending down, right outside the door), but then I found out they are a local-to-Tennessee business, just up the road in Knoxville. That made me proud that this innovative, family-owned business is exporting such a great product all over the world! I even convinced my friend to buy a matching one with me and my mom to buy the 5 tier design, so we’re all planning for some great fall harvests.

After spending the money on the planter and the ProMix soil, I didn’t want to shell out for plants, so I started everything from seed. So far, the kale, spinach, bush beans, and radishes have all popped up and I am sure the others will, too at some point. This is another great experiment that I am hoping to bring to the library (so we can start our own library gardening programs) and the farm to add to our growing list of trials to see what grows!

Honestly, it’s great to have jobs that all tie into each other in some way, so that when I do good work over in one area, another one benefits from the new knowledge! At the library we are currently applying for a $1000 grant to get GreenStalk vertical gardens for the library so that we can make gardening accessible to all age ranges and demographics — children, elderly, differently abled.

I can’t wait to talk to Maple Key students about my new way of playing and planning in the garden that supplements what we’re doing in the traditional garden beds. My hope is to inspire them with even more things to put in their bag of gardening tricks for when they desire to start their own gardens. I want them to always carry a sense of play, have fun, learn new things 🙂

A Little Closer to Eden

Posted on by Rachel Lonas

It’s been a very hot summer here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Little rain and temps in the upper 90’s. I am convinced the only way people are keeping their plants alive is through drip irrigation. And yet despite the drought, I see a lot of people still finding ways to keep the gardening spirit alive around here.

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Ripening in the windowsill…


I recently visited my city’s local high school with my neighbor who teaches environmental science there. She acquired some local grants to get a garden going for her students. She has sturdy raised beds and a ground melon patch going. While I was there, some students came to help us prune the very abundant tomato plants. I asked one of them how they got into gardening, as a lot of people her age aren’t spending their summers oohing and ahhing over tomatoes. She said she worked at the local Dollar Tree and earlier they had some grow kits come in around February. She got curious and the rest is history — she has a thriving tomato plant at her house and is using some of the dirt from the kit to try other things.

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Bush beans, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers!

I was really encouraged by her answer because let’s be honest, there is a start up cost to gardening. Containers, potting soil, plants, seeds, water, tools. It adds up so quickly every year. This rising senior started small, kept costs low, saw success, and now wanted to know more and expand her own garden. Inspiration comes from so many unexpected places!

In a similar vein, this local headline caught my eye last week about one more place in our area that is recognizing that children and their communities need gardens.

They built a garden from scratch and then found out they had to move the whole operation somewhere else on campus due to needing a portable classroom in that area (I would die if someone told me that I had to do that much labor over!). But they rallied again and are rebuilding their garden so the children can be involved and eat fresh produce snacks once more during recess time. What memories those teachers are instilling in their students just by letting them be a part of growing their own community’s food (particularly in an area that is considered a food desert).

Similarly, a local high school is helping provide healthier options in the school cafeterias through hydroponics!

The school my older girls go to also focus heavily on being outdoors and having a horticultural presence in the area. This spring, they raised money through a big plant sale. All plants were grown from seed in their greenhouse by students and the teacher. I purchased a Cherokee purple tomato plant and it is continuing to do really well in the front yard.

In addition, the community center in our city has improved its community garden this year. I dropped by and noticed all the cherry tomatoes and basil ready for any child or adult hanging out at the playground to pluck and eat.

Stories like this give me hope. Having lived in this area almost my whole life, I can say that school gardening was not going on in the 1990’s and if community gardens existed as I am seeing them now, I was completely unaware. Thanks to the internet and social media, I see churches, schools, and city governments pushing for revitalization through various gardening opportunities. I am thankful to be a part of this process and excited to see what decades of gardening exposure — literally just being around gardens on the regular — normalizes for my children’s generation.

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Time for picklin’…