MALE ANNOUNCER: Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by-- FEMALE ANNOUNCER: The Subaru Crosstrek, designed with adventure in mind, built in a zero landfill plant, so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru-- proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

MALE ANNOUNCER: And the following-- the US Composting Council, Milorganite, and Rain Bird.

[gentle instrumental music] ♪ JOE LAMP'L [voice-over]: I'm Joe Lamp'l.

For 10 years, Growing a Greener World has told the stories of the people and the places who are making a difference in the health of our environment and the sustainability of our global community.

But as we embarked on our 11th season, life changed overnight.

So many things we took for granted would never be the same again.

Now it's up to each of us to take a more active role in not just saving our planet, but making it better, feeding our families with organically grown food, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, starting in our own backyards.

Growing a Greener World-- it's still our mission, and it's more important than ever.

♪ [pleasant music] Connection.

That's what I miss the most during this COVID-19 crisis.

Just having a chance to visit with my neighbors and friends as part of my day to day routine or traveling the country to collect the stories that we share on the show, or going to the farmer's market on a Saturday or visiting my favorite garden center.

Everyone says that we're all in this together, but for many of us, we've never felt so alone and isolated.

And that got me thinking about the Growing a Greener World community.

Maybe you're a regular viewer of the show.

Maybe you get caught up with a podcast or a few online classes.

How'd the straw bales do by the way?

I tried that for the first time this year.

Nick's success.

Maybe you've reached out for gardening advice through email or Facebook.

Whatever the case, we're all connected, bound to one another by this common thread of wanting to do our part to help make the world a greener place.

So it occurred to me that maybe the stories most worth sharing in this time are your stories.

So I reached out to you.

And I was blown away by what you shared and how you're coping with COVID and how getting into the garden is helping us all in ways that we're just now beginning to grasp.

- Hi Joe, and Growing your Greener World crew.

My name is Evan Naismith.

I'm a sommelier here in Sonoma County, California.

I really started growing vegetables and flowers during COVID-19 and got the opportunity to share them with my neighbors.

Alright, so at the beginning of the lockdown for COVID-19 was actually the beginning of my gardening career.

I never really had a green thumb before.

I started listening to a couple of podcasts and I listened to the dense planting episode with Craig LeHoullier and before I knew it, I had 20 or 30 extra zucchini plants and no idea what to do with them.

So I put a sign up on my fence saying free seedlings, and they were gone within just a couple of hours and they actually started disappearing so quickly that I ran out of pots.

So I set up a little recycling program for my neighborhood as well.

I ended up buying dozens of different varieties of seeds, tons of soil, and at this point, I've now given away 1100 plants over the course of the season.

This is what we'll be giving away this week.

We've got some artichoke, bell pepper, coneflower, tons of cilantro 'cause it's California.

And then Joe, your favorite, the sun gold tomato.

So that's my story as to how I finally got the opportunity to learn how to garden during the lockdown.

And I was able to help out my community to do the same.

- Hi Joe, hi, Growing a Greener World crew.

It's MJ Ramos from [indistinct] on Long Island in New York, which was very hard hit during the COVID crisis.

In March, we had over 11,000 new cases a day for a couple of days and it was clear that the frontline workers were just completely, overburdened and nearing a breaking point.

So I wanted to do something nice for them.

And I thought it might be a good idea to create a little kitchen garden in a bag that we could bring to them in June, by my calculations.

Hopefully by then things would be better.

And the gardens that the frontline workers didn't get to grow and establish, when everybody else was able to do that.

I thought that might be a welcomed surprise.

And we were able to deliver 50 bags, 12 to four different hospitals here on Long Island, mid June.

And they were really well received.

I only have two that I can show you that are leftover.

A lot of the gardeners that were amongst the frontline workers were really appreciative of having a little garden and I've heard from a number of them.

And, they were really touched and surprised and it was lovely.

- Good morning, Joe and GGW friends.

My name is April Dodge and I live here in Gilbert, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix.

As quarantine began a few months ago, I noticed a lot of fear and anxiety amongst friends and family.

And I could relate to those feelings.

This garden started two years prior.

It was nothing but hard compacted dirt back here.

And my son was battling Leukemia and we needed a place to find joy.

And I started this garden with a hope and a dream that we could spend so many times out here as a family and mother nature did not fail us.

She has provided us so much joy and so much, nurture and nourishment.

And so I knew that was an answer.

I just wanna point out when Joe says to build strong, big sturdy tomato cages, he means it.

I did it and these guys just took over, but that's okay.

We made this fun seating area, and sometimes you just have to sit back and relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

In fact, this is what I picked this morning and I am going to go share that with the new neighbors, say hi and introduce ourselves.

And our final addition has been the girls [chickens clucking] and my boys love coming out every morning and all day really, and playing with them and collecting their eggs.

And they've been a great addition to our quarantine garden.

Thank you for coming along and get out there and plant something.

- As we kept getting emails and photos and videos, I noticed a recurring theme and it kept coming up over and over.

Many people were using their extra time at home to do more growing and nearly everyone was also finding ways to do more sharing of their harvest and of their knowhow.

Like friends of the show, John and Maureen Lalley, - Hello, fellow Growing a Greener World fans.

We're John and Maureen Lalley and we live just outside Baltimore, Maryland and we're avid gardeners.

We'd like to share with you today some of the ways in which our gardens have helped us cope with this very stressful and difficult time.

- In mid March, our daughter and her husband's successful catering company quickly realized the impact when all of their spring events were canceled.

As they read over the list of what John was planting, they saw a new opportunity to not only deliver their fresh meals to hospitals and clients, but to offer their garden packs for them to grow their own food at home.

Assorted lettuces, colorful cherry tomatoes and heirlooms and herbs.

- [John] And down below, our new raised bed gardens, with tomatoes and sunflowers, zinnias, squash.

And you can see we follow Joe's lead on the tomato cages, which have been fantastic.

Although we live inside the Baltimore beltway, we're lucky enough to live in an area, it feels like country and we live on a lane, with a dead end, so we get very little traffic here.

One of the surprise benefits of covid has been the amount of foot traffic we've seen over the last four or five months.

Neighbors from all over the area have been walking by typically as families.

And of course we've been in our garden and have been able to socialize, give gardening tips and even spawned a neighborhood gardening tour.

- Hi Joe, hi, Growing a Greener World team.

My name is Lynn Shelton and I'm at the Bright School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I'm an eco literacy specialist and I'm in our organic vegetable garden.

We started this last year and it was really wonderful and I was really excited to be a part of it.

And then the pandemic hit and we had to cut things short and it was really difficult.

I had to make a decision on what to do if I was going to go forward and I chose to continue planting all of the seeds I had started in the beds and get our warm season crops going, even though it was really lonely to do it without the kids here.

I miss their voices, I missed their enthusiasm.

It was really tough.

We gave away a lot of plants to our community, to our school community.

And, I tried to help them get started on their gardens and it's really exciting, really heartwarming for me.

The other reason it was really important for me to keep going is that we donate pretty much all of our produce to the local food bank.

We have a lot of plums and squash and cucumbers and tons of tomatoes.

And I'm looking forward to dropping that off today.

I can't wait to have the kids back in the garden asking for sprigs of Rosemary and marigold blooms and all the fun things that they love to play with when they're here.

And we have mud kitchens.

Oh, I can't wait.

Things are different, but being outside, I think, is a really good way for them to feel like children and to really learn about the resilience of nature and the connection.

We're all connected and learning about nature and connecting to nature, you really, really feel that and it brings hope and it brings a sense of calm.

So thank you.

- Hi, I'm John Malanchak.

I'm a master gardener in central Mississippi.

I live in Madison, Mississippi, just North of the city of Jackson, which is our state capital.

I've been gardening now for about three and a half years with 250 special needs kids in the local area.

Simply put, the project consisted of just growing vegetables seeds under grow lights at three special needs facilities.

So I gave the kids an opportunity to see the plants growing and become part of this life thing with those plants and understand it.

However, after three weeks, COVID shut down all the facilities.

They shut down Mississippi Ag museum, where all the plants were going to go to begin with.

For those 10 days between the 13th and the 23rd, I seriously considered letting those plants die.

But towards the end of that 10 day period, I told God, I said, let's go ahead and do this.

Let's, let's get this done because the kids deserve better.

And at that point I brought all the plants back, nursed him to health, and then I became the gardener.

I just wanna end this by saying the kids were magnificent.

They got to see things on zoom.

We had a standing out in the rain with them and of course, they're in their house, but I just wanna let everybody know Growing a Greener World and Mr. Joe, that if it wasn't for your class on master seeds starting, I would have never done this and gave me that confidence at the beginning to do it.

Will I do it next year?

By all means.

[soft music] - Hi Joe, and the Growing a Greener World fam.

My name is Maria and I am the founder and host of the Bloom & Grow radio podcast, and a plant friend of Joe's.

And I was living in my tiny apartment in New York city.

The epicenter of COVID-19 during the entirety of this pandemic in 2020.

I have to say, living in New York city was a little scary, a lot scary for those first couple of months in the midst of all of this social distancing.

It was isolating, nerve wracking and man, the planning and planting up of my nine square foot balcony garden truly saved me.

You know, the pandemic was hard for me.

I lost a job.

I had to reschedule my wedding.

There was a lot of health concerns for us New Yorkers, and so many people in our country and planning this balcony garden and then planting it up really kept me calm, focused, and creative.

And it gave me something to look forward to that I knew was coming and that I knew I could watch bloom and grow throughout the season.

So this is it.

This is not glamorous.

This is not probably what you think, but this is what I do every morning.

I come, I sit, I write in my journal.

I pick my mint, I rub my mint.

I smell it.

That's my favorite smell.

I pick some basil.

I rub it up.

I give it a smell.

Sometimes I'll eat a strawberry or blueberry, whatever I'm growing.

I'll watch a pea plant or a tomato flower, slowly ripen and slowly turn into this fruit, which is unbelievable.

Through this whole process, I've been watching my tomato plants go from this little tiny seedling to a little flower, to this little fruit and we harvested our first tomato a couple of weeks ago.

And our gardening community knows there is no better feeling and no better taste than that, of their first harvested tomato of the season.

- [Joe] The Growing a Greener World community isn't only you, the viewers and fans and listeners and followers.

It's those of us on this side of it too.

Me, as well as the crew responsible for bringing the show to you, and helping share information on various platforms.

And when I asked them how they were dealing with COVID, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that every single member of the GGW team is not only talking the talk, but walking the walk too.

- Okay, so here's my garden.

I'm in Bixby, Oklahoma.

It's very hot and humid here right now, as I'm filming this.

It's right after 4th of July weekend and the sun's about to go down, a very warm evening, and I'm just about to make my rounds and check everything out.

Okay, so if we come through here, [dog panting] have some green beans growing here in these whiskey barrels, and they're not looking too great right now.

The heat has really seemed to get to them, but we had a pretty good harvest.

We had some peas.

Of course, we've harvested all of those.

And this is our milkweeds, so we grow a lot of different types of native plants and we grow the milkweeds, so that we can support the Monarch butterfly Caterpillar.

And we've already raised several of those this spring, but we'll see the majority of those in the fall.

Here's some more tomato plants.

These are some Roma varieties or some paste varieties.

I'm pretty sure this is Amish paste.

Oh yeah, that one's looking like it's pretty close too.

Need to get that pretty soon.

Over here is the grapevine.

Oh and some of them are already starting to turn purple.

Those are really delicious and they make great grape jelly.

[soft music] And I always have sunflowers.

Sunflowers are kind of a staple in my garden.

The bees love them.

The birds love the seeds.

They're so pretty.

They just look beautiful every summer when they start to bloom and open up.

[soft music] - Hi, I'm Erin.

Welcome to my balcony garden.

I was really determined to have full size edible plants.

Patio varieties are great, but I really just had my heart set on full size plants, and especially eggplant, because I love eggplant.

It's my favorite.

And then I also have three indeterminate tomatoes.

And so the way that I'm growing the indeterminate tomatoes in such a small vertical space is just taking advantage of the fact that they are a vining plant.

And so I set up this twine sort of trellis.

And let me tell you, hanging the hooks for this on this second story balcony was probably not my finest moment of safety first, but there were no injuries.

So water, water was also gonna be a challenge for me because there's no running water out here.

Fortunately, a creative balcony Gardner from the Joe Gardner Facebook community shared a post where she put in a Y valve on the plumbing into her washing machine.

And so I ran out and got a Y valve.

And so now, one hose goes into the washing machine and one goes to a garden hose that runs out here and that has just made watering a dream.

That's my little balcony garden, just spreading the love, spreading the garden love, spreading the excitement and the joy [pleasant music] - [Carl] So here we are in July.

Squash and zucchini are looking, very well [indistinct] right there.

Joe would be proud of these.

I'm not quiet sure they're ready yet, but, I'm gonna take a picture and I'm gonna ask Joe.

[ding] I think that big one though, is ready.

You know, I always wanted be like like Joe Lamp'l?

So here's my little, on camera bit about gardening tools.

Okay, here we go.

[beep] So now that tool that you always grab for out of the garden shed?

And I'm murdering this right off the bat.

All right, so we're gonna keep trying again.

Here we go.

All right, so I wanna say, you know that go to tool?

Well, this is mine, this is the oscillating hoe.

[beep] It allows me to get in there under my plants and get the little grass evens out and I'll show [indistinct] of that.

[beep] You know that that go to?

Three, two.

This is really harder than it looks.

[beep] You now that go to tool that you always go for?

Well, mine is an oscillating hoe.

It allows me to get in there underneath plants, get the little weed seedlings going.

And, yeah, I suck at this - Welcome to my 64 square foot vegetable garden.

So you can see I've got these big cages built over the two raised beds.

Those are new this year, the cages.

I was having a big problem with squirrels stealing most of our tomatoes.

So I got some two by two lumber, and just built a simple frame over the outside of each bed, and then stretched a bird netting over the top.

So the entire raised bed is encased in bird netting.

It means that I have to go through and sort of unhook the netting from those screws every time I wanna get in there to pull something, to get some weeds, to harvest something, to do any sort of maintenance.

It's a little more work for me, but I haven't lost a single tomato yet this year.

This is a summer garden only.

But what I have found is when the cages are down and the plants are out, I end up using those raised beds as part of my Halloween display every year.

And those have been a big hit.

It's easy to dress those raised beds up with some lights and some fake stone decoration, and suddenly turned that into the focal point of a whole graveyard scene every Halloween.

So, that's a nice way to reuse the garden beds that I'll bet you've never considered, Joe - From zucchini to zombies.

There are so many things that a simple garden can do to bring about change and change is something that we have all had plenty of 2020, but it's something that we'll continue to need to do as we get through these times.

But I hope that these stories, your stories, have done for you, what they've done for me.

They've given me hope.

They've shown me the best in people and they've demonstrated the awesome power of plants.

And they've reminded me that even though we haven't had as much face to face time as before, there's still this connection that exists, that we all share because of the garden.

So to close out this unprecedented season, I wanna give the final word to you because you're the ones who are truly growing a greener world.

- [Man] If you have the opportunity to do this as a home gardener, I'd definitely recommend planting extra seedlings and access crop insurance.

So if your a pumpkin doesn't go the way that you thought it would well, you've got some backups and then additionally, it fosters this incredible sense of community.

Everybody's growing the same thing, and everybody's extremely grateful in the neighborhood.

- [Woman] So this is my garden.

This is how I grow a greener world.

- Thank you, Joe, for creating a community that really lifted me up during some troubling, scary times.

I'm so happy to have gardening as a new found hobby.

I am absolutely in love with it.

And I learn more and more each year with every little balcony harvest.

I wish our whole community happiness and health, and here's hoping for 2021 - Anyway, dag, I got to cut this together.

Yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing behind the camera.

So here's to you, Joe - I hope everybody stays safe, stay well and grow greener a world.

Spend time in the garden, it's good for your soul.

- I hope that you start a garden big or small, just start and then help others.

And I believe that is how we are going to build a happier, kinder, gentler greener world.

♪ MALE ANNOUNCER: Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by-- FEMALE ANNOUNCER: The Subaru Crosstrek, designed with adventure in mind, built in a zero landfill plant, so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru-- proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

MALE ANNOUNCER: And the following-- the US Composting Council, Milorganite, and Rain Bird.

[gentle instrumental music] ♪ MALE ANNOUNCER: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host, Joe Lamp'l's Online Gardening Academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to growingagreenerworld.com/learn.

[funky techno jingle] ♪ ♪