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GrowJourney Member Story: Valerie Benko from Lyndora, PA
The GrowJourney Member Stories Series features real GrowJourney members and their experiences in their organic gardens. If you’re a GrowJourney member, and you want to share your GrowJourney story, please get in touch!
This GrowJourney story features Valerie Benko. All photos are from her garden.
- Years gardening: 5
- Location:Lyndora, PA
- Instagram: @val_entine99
Finally! Garden Pot Sizes Decoded…
At least 10,000 of my (Eliza’s) brain cells died during the grueling research that brought you this information, so please honor their brave sacrifice by sharing it with your other gardening friends (they're guaranteed to have been confused by pot sizes at some point in their gardening careers). Also, 8
Gorgeous Edible Landscaping Made Easy, Part 1 of 3: Design Theory (and How to Get Started)
GrowJourney's Organic Gardening Tip of the Month for May, 2017. Let’s face it, using edible plants in a garden design and actually having it turn out pretty is a challenge. Sprawling squash vines, chaotic tomatoes, and scraggly peppers with naked stems are why so many vegetable
Top 5 reasons you keep killing your potted tomato plants
The featured image for this article is a tomato harvest from GrowJourney member Monika Melsha's 2016 porch garden. You can read her story here. We're not judging you. After all, you don't intend to murder your potted tomato plants. It just seems to happen. In the spring, you start with
Oh, kale no! Organic pest control for kale & brassica pest insects.
The April 2017 Organic Gardening Tip of the Month From GrowJourney Our edible organic landscape is a brassica-producing machine for 3 out of 4 seasons of the year (our summers are too hot). In case you don't know, brassicas are a genus of plant that produce
How to Have Your Butterfly Garden and Eat It Too
Foreward by Aaron von Frank, cofounder of GrowJourney: The writer of this article, Dr. April Gordon, is better known to me as "mom," and has been a lifelong inspiration to everyone fortunate enough to know her. A voracious reader, scholar, world traveller, and social scientist, she introduced me
The Surprising Benefits Of Gardening Go Way Beyond Your Health
We love organic gardening and can't imagine life without being surrounded by plants, wildlife, and garden-fresh food. But we also like gardening because we think there's convincing research showing that EVERYONE would benefit if they had access to an organic garden, whether in their own yard/patio or through a shared
Is your garden fertilizer causing pest insect infestations on your plants?
Our March Tip of the Month explores the connection between the fertilizers you use and the pest insect problems those choices can create. If you want to seriously geek out on where synthetic nitrogen fertilizer comes from and what its global impacts are, we suggest you
How to Grow Lettuce: Tips & Tricks For the Home Gardener
We admit it: we love "rabbit food," as veggie-averse folks often refer to lettuce. Human food: we love big piles of mixed green salads with lots of lettuces mixed in. Extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and nutritional yeast are the only other ingredients you need to
How to have your raised bed garden created before breakfast
We’re big proponents of DIY (do it yourself) but sometimes, time and resources make it difficult to take the DIY approach. When it comes to gardening, many people put off getting started because they think it’s going to be hard, grueling work that will require spending days sourcing materials and doing construction. If this sounds like you, we’ve got good news: we’re going to show you how you can click a few buttons on your computer, then have your garden set up and ready to go ridiculously fast – yes, even before breakfast.
8 Ways To Kill Your Garden Seedlings
You get excited about gardening. You get a few seed packets to start – after all, the varieties in the packets are way more interesting and less expensive than the full grown seedlings for sale in the plant nursery. You bring your seeds home, plop them in soil, and voila! You kill them all… assuming they even germinate in the first place. If this sounds like you, please read on…
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