FREE Special Issue: How to Start a Freedom Garden—get FREE access to read this special issue right now!

Dear Home Food Gardener,

A Freedom Garden by any other name would be just as productive, but it’s the intent behind the growing that makes a Freedom Garden special. If you enjoy growing your own food at home, you can make your garden that much more special by planting a little extra to share with friends and neighbors.

Here at the Food Gardening Network, we’re all about growing our own good food. But now we have even more incentive to garden at home — supply chain issues and inflation are just a couple incentives. With our FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden, you have a blueprint to get your own Freedom Garden growing!

It’s not a new concept; during World War I, Victory Gardens were promoted as a way to grow food for civilians in time of war. That gardening movement caught on and, in truth, it’s never really stopped.

If you’ve been on the fence about starting your own garden, now is the perfect time to read our FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden, to get started.

How to Start a Freedom Garden: a Community Effort

Freedom Gardens are part of a movement to bring people together around their shared interest in grown food. The overarching vision is to nurture backyard and community gardens that can provide fresh, healthy food for those who need it most. Freedom Gardens provide the time and space for people to share ideas, build community, and create lasting change. All this while growing good food!

Raised Beds or Open Garden Plot?

There are plenty of good reasons for either choice. In the end, a lot will depend on your soil and your gardening needs. Open plots are easy to establish, but they’re not accessible to all gardeners. Raised beds make for easy weeding, but soil and building materials add to the cost.

In How to Start a Freedom Garden, we lay out the essential points for you to consider before you start your planting:

• Soil Quality
• Cost
• Landscape
• Maintenance
• Planting
• Watering
• Mulching
• Weed Covers
• Weeding and Pruning

How you set up your Freedom Garden is entirely up to you; in many cases, it comes down to budget and preference. Maybe you’ll plant a little of both!

No Backyard? No Problem! In How to Start a Freedom Garden: Container Gardening

We don’t all have the space to plant a backyard garden. But if you have room for just a few containers, you can transform a part of your porch, balcony, or patio into a lush green growing space. The main rule of thumb here is: grow what you like to eat. There’s no point planting vegetables, no matter how easy-growing, if you and your friends and neighbors won’t eat them. Here’s a sampling of foods that are good candidates for container gardening. Remember: pick what you’ll eat.

• Herbs
• Tomatoes
• Lettuce
• Peas
• Radishes
• Beets
• Eggplant

These are just some of the foods that can flourish in containers. If there’s something you’d really like to grow, check out its growing requirements. Chances are, you can make it work.

Your containers can be something as basic as a bucket, something as elegant as a ceramic planter, or something as practical as a grow bag. Some grow bags even come with little flaps so you can check deep in the soil for crops like potatoes.

Feeling ambitious? In How to Start a Freedom Garden: Creating a Greenhouse Freedom Garden

When you picture a greenhouse, do you imagine a towering structure made of glass? That’s certainly one style. There are home-size greenhouse kits you can get, complete with temperature control and fans to maintain just the right growing conditions. But you can also get much simpler kits that will fit on your porch or in a corner of your yard.

One of the best benefits of having a greenhouse is being able to get a jump on the gardening season. If you live in an area with a short gardening season, you want to give your plants the earliest start possible. Our FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden, gives you tips on greenhouse planning.

How to Start a Freedom Garden: The Power is in the Planning

It’s easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of starting a garden. But before you get too far into it, you might want to take a step back and do a little planning. How much space do you have? What can you plant that you’ll really eat? How much time do you have to spend tending your Freedom Garden? Our FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden, gives you tips on planning out your Freedom Garden, selecting the ideal companion plants that will grow well with your main choices, plus advice on rotating your crops from one season to the next to keep your Freedom Garden as healthy as can be.

Be Ready for Harvest Time: How to Start a Freedom Garden Has Tips for Food Preservation

One of the goals of having a Freedom Garden is to have more than enough to eat yourself. It would be ideal if you had extra to share with friends and neighbors who could use a little something. Now, that’s not always going to mean fresh okra or carrots from the garden; it might be pickles or preserves.

In our FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden, we outline the basics of food preservation and highlight the foods that are the best choices for canning, freezing, fermenting, or long-term cold storage.

Start Your Freedom Garden Today!

From seed, site, and soil selection to container gardening and food preservation, our FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden, walks you through the essential steps of getting your Freedom Garden started.

You can do your part by reading How to Start a Freedom Garden right now, and consider planning your own Freedom Garden to grow your own good food and help others around you!

Sincerely,

Amanda MacArthur,
Senior Editor & Producer
Food Gardening Network
P.S. Act now to get this FREE Special Issue, How to Start a Freedom Garden—and you’ll learn more about the Freedom Garden movement!