Bill Dugan, Editor and Publisher of Food Gardening Network

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you might very well be one of the first subscribers to Food Gardening Magazine—and, likely, you’re a full Gold Charter Membership of Food Gardening Network.

Welcome to the Charter Issue of Food Gardening Magazine!

Food gardening has been on the rise in recent years—by people of all ages and backgrounds. Everyone is discovering the joy and satisfaction of growing, harvesting, and eating good food—grown right in your own food garden at home. It pleases me to know that some of the highest participation-rate increases for food gardening have been among 18-34-year-olds, those in urban areas, and households with children. Let the joy of home food gardening spread!

And food-gardening trends point to continued growth, including with vegetable gardening, herb and spice gardening, and growing fruits and berries.

Back to our magazine. Now in the old days of publishing, it was tiring—and often singularly focused—to decide to publish a print magazine. In today’s “need-it-all-now” world, publishing a magazine is just part of serving an important audience like you about a topic such as home food gardening.

Food Gardening Magazine is just one component of Gold Charter Membership that delivers content in many ways to avid food gardeners like you. The Food Gardening Gold Charter Membership also includes access to:

• Food Gardening Gardening Guides: These plant-specific collection of articles are about how to grow, harvest, and enjoy all the foods from your garden. Food Gardening Gardening Guides are anchored on a Video Preview of the content and include a written summary review with “Curator’s Corner”; Feature Articles detail the history and background of a specific plant and include action-oriented tips about planting and caring for your garden; Plant Profiles highlight and detail the major varieties; Recipes for the featured food are easy-to-prepare and delicious; Nutrition and health benefits highlight the health and life benefits of the specific plant; Resources guide you to other valuable information; and a Glossary section explains acronyms and key terms.
• Food Gardening Daily: Regular, practical FREE advice about how to create and manage your own food garden at home, delivered to your email inbox and accessible at the website. Daily tips and advice focus on specific food-gardening essentials for getting you started with your own garden, managing and maintaining a productive food garden, and guiding you with plant-specific profiles about growing different varieties.
• Food Gardening Freebies: FREE guides about food-gardening techniques and growing specific foods—to make your garden delightful and productive. Each Food Gardening Freebie gives you action-oriented advice about setting up and managing your own food garden.

Now back to our magazine. We cover how to grow, harvest, and enjoy specific foods from your garden—gardening tips that gardeners of every skill level can use; and food-specific articles that include highlights of special gardening guides, three plant-specific gardening guides featured in every issue.

And our magazine is digital, to ensure you can access it from anywhere, right away when it’s published—and so that you can access all the back issues, in one place, and easily search for exactly what you want and need.

In this July 2020 premier edition of Food Gardening Magazine—our debut Charter Issue!—you’ll discover valuable and helpful content, and some of my favorites, including:

• “Gardening with Amanda” articles—Amanda McArthur is one of our resident experts about home food gardening. When Amanda writes and speaks, it comes from hands-on experience, since she has a year-round garden at her home! Plus, Amanda is a best-selling cookbook author—she really knows how to best use her food harvests! Check out these three helpful articles from Amanda:
  • “The Best Veggies to Plant in July”: Get Amanda’s list of the seven best vegetables to plant in July, no matter where you live—complete with estimated time until harvest. And these are common plants that you’ll start harvesting before and into the fall. Wonderful greens, lettuces, and root vegetables! Find out what can still be planted this summer. Hint: tomatoes aren’t on this list; they need an earlier start. And now—I can’t help myself—the spoiler alert: beets! Multi-purpose for culinary uses, beets can survive frosts and even short spells of temperatures well below freezing. Get the rest of the list now!
  • “DIY Homemade Bug Spray for Vegetable Plants”: Want an easy, do-it-yourself (DIY) method to make homemade bug spray for vegetable plants—safe spray that will kill and repel pests like aphids, beetles, and mites? Amanda has you covered with this article! Get a quick, easy, and effective recipe for bug spray that will protect your plants—with this article now.
  • “Summer Tomato Basil Mozzarella Salad Recipe from the Garden”: By now, you should have some ripe and juicy tomatoes harvested from your garden. Do what I do—make Amanda’s tomato-basil-mozzarella salad several nights a week during peak tomato harvest times. A quick-and-easy way to enjoy your delicious tomatoes often—while they’re at their best!
• Special Gardening Guides—get full reviews and summaries of three premium gardening guides, complete with links to the full gardening guides that include plant-specific history and background; seed, seedling, and soil advice; tips on fertilizing, weeding, and watering; best ways to avoid plant diseases and pests; even how to treat affected plants; plant profiles that highlight some popular varieties; quick-and-easy recipes that are tasty and worthy of your table; nutrition, health, and home remedies; more food gardening resources to help your efforts; and glossary items to explain technical or unknown terms and concepts:
  • The Everything Tomato Guide—what’s a summer food garden without tomatoes? Get everything you need to know to about growing, harvesting, cooking, and eating tomatoes. My favorite fun fact about tomatoes? The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1893 that, for trade and tariff purposes at least, tomatoes are a vegetable (we all know that tomatoes are technically a fruit).
  • The Basil Grower’s Guide—one of the most bountiful herbs in any food garden, get everything you need to grow tons of basil! My own personal takeaway: What to do if your basil leaves start to turn yellow (what causes it—and how to avoid and recover from it)—I can’t believe I didn’t already know this, given how much basil I grow every year!
  • Blueberry Bonanza—literally, this collection will have you thinking about growing blueberries, even if you don’t think it’s possible for you (home food gardening is always about the possibilities!). Even if you don’t have space to grow blueberries, the recipes alone are worth the ticket in this collection!

It’s summertime, so go out and enjoy all this carefully curated content about food gardening at your home—and reap all the benefits, so you can feast on fabulous food!

Happy gardening—and happy eating!

Bill Dugan
Editor and Publisher

P.S. I love food gardening so much, because I love to cook and eat good food! Check out all the easy-to-make recipes in every issue of Food Gardening Magazine—no other food-gardening resource is chock-full of such a wide variety of easy and tasty recipes!

P.P.S. And one of the other benefits that makes us quite different from other sources—Food Gardening Network is for home food gardeners and created by home food gardeners. We’re all in this together with you, to provide you with content this is informative, instructional, and fun!