- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: The 2018 Subaru Crosstrek, built in a zero-landfill plant, so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

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- [Male Announcer] And the following: [gentle instrumental music] - [voice-over] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal.

To tell stories of everyday people.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real, they're passionate, they're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement, it's our mission.

[pleasant music] Every gardener I know complains at least a little bit on their challenging climate.

Like for me, in the deep South, the oppressive heat can burn the fruit right on the plant.

And that high humidity is the perfect environment for all kinds of plant diseases.

And yet we've met one gardener who pretty much has all of the speak when it comes to challenging weather.

Now you might not be able to tell that from where I'm standing today but this area could be perhaps the most unlikely place to do any sort of serious garden, much less have a productive year round vegetable garden that we'll introduce you to today.

Mother nature can be pretty nasty here seven months out of the year.

And yet this garden cranks out the food 365 days a year, even so using every season extension tip in the book.

So today, we're gonna learn all kinds of tips and ideas.

And I'm looking forward to learning a few myself and taking them back to my garden so it can be more productive too, and I bet, you'll learn some great ideas too.

Halifax, the capital of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.

It's pretty remote, relatively speaking.

Almost as far east as you can possibly get in Canada, still 400 miles to the east of Boston, and to the lower 48 states, only part of Maine, it's further north.

In terms of weather, Halifax season average of only one day a year over 86 degrees.

But a full 49 days a year below freezing.

70 plus inches of snowfall annually, they come over all but four months of the calendar.

But with it's coast line location, it's also susceptible to hurricanes and gets close to 50 inches of rain each year.

Maybe not the first place you choose for growing a year round, edible garden.

But that hasn't stopped Niki Jabbour.

- So for me it started with a patch of arugula in my garden, probably almost 20 years ago now.

Here in the backyard in my Halifax garden, and I had wanted to harvest some arugula but it was getting a little late in the season.

And so I went up to the garden.

It was October, I was gonna plant garlic and the arugula still looked amazing.

And I was like, ah, what's going on now?

We've had a couple frosts, it's chilly.

And I realized it was cold tolerant.

And we harvested from that arugula with a simple row cover for until Christmas, which to me was amazing.

And then I thought, well, if I can do this with arugula, is there anything else I can do this with?

So it sort of led me down into this rabbit hole of looking for crops that are more cold tolerant.

What can I grow?

How can I protect them?

And now, 20 plus years later, you know I probably have 30 different types of crops.

We went to harvest all winter long.

You know sweet root crops like carrots and beets and celeriac.

As well as leafy greens like spinach, my arugula, which is still my favorite green.

Chard, kales, so many different varieties.

Stem crops like leek and kohlrabi.

So there's so many different types of vegetables you can cold season harvest even in a northern short season garden.

- And she's doing so well at it, Niki has become a respected voice in the field, and a teacher to others.

She's an award winning horticultural author, with her fourth title on the way.

She's a contributing columnist for magazines and newspapers.

She hosts a weekly radio show and she manages her Savvy Gardening blog.

In addition, she's got an incredible social media fan base.

Almost a 100,000 followers on Instagram.

That's where Niki shares her considerable success stories.

But also documents her real world growing struggles too.

Garden failures are part of the process.

We can prep, we can plan all that we want, January, February, March.

But mother nature has the final say.

[laughs] And sometimes, she's not super kind.

We do have late frosts.

And we have early frosts.

We have droughts.

We have monsoon rains.

So you an the always predict what's gonna happen.

You prepare and plan as best you can.

A gardening friend said to me recently that the garden was a disaster this year.

Their tomatoes, they were so late, they weren't coming well.

Their peppers weren't doing great.

Eggplants didn't happen for them and then I said, "Well what did well for you?"

And then they started going on and on about the beans, the peas, the greens, the carrots, the turnips, all these things that were successful.

And I'm like, "Sounds like "you had a pretty great year after all."

There's always gonna be a few things, that depending on the season and what mother nature throws at you aren't gonna thrive and do well.

But for the most part, most things will do well, if you put a little time and effort into it.

So concentrate on your successes.

Learn from your failures, and just keep moving forward.

But I just think it's really fun, like to try different foods from around the world.

And I know I live in a zone five garden, short season garden and sometimes things just don't do that well for me.

And depending on the season as well.

They can shift, of course.

But generally, I can grow West African Burr Gherkins very easily, tomatillos.

So there's a lot of vegetables that we didn't grow up with here, traditionally Nova Scotia.

Many that are more southern-type crops, but they do great for me here.

And I think it's just about experimenting and trying new things.

And it keeps the vegetable garden fun.

I mean when those seed catalogs come in January, do not talk to me for at least a week 'cause I am busy circling everything I wanna grow.

Some of my favorite things to grow include the weird stuff.

I love the odd ball vegetables, the cucamelons, the Burr Gherkins, the snake gourds, the Mekti Lebanese cucumbers.

So I love to grow a lot of different things like that, as well as, of course, the huge array of heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables you can get through seed companies.

When I first started growing a lot of the cold tolerant vegetables, they were hard to source.

But seed catalogs, the past 10 or 15 years, have really started to offer so many different varieties and cultivars.

So I find it really much easier to find both unique vegetable, as well as a lot of the cold tolerant ones.

So I love to grow things like that.

My favorite vegetable, which is probably a little weird, is beans [laughs] are the beans in the garden.

And I grow probably at least a dozen varieties every year.

Purple beans, striped beans, yellow beans, green beans.

I love them all.

I guess my least favorite vegetable, is there a least favorite vegetable?

That's a hard question.

I kinda love them all.

[pleasant music] - But Niki's garden is more than just dozens upon dozens of different fruits, vegetables, and herbs, this garden is also packed with hundreds of stunning flowers.

When you come and look at your garden, it's a little confusing as to whether this is a vegetable garden or flower garden, I get that now.

And looking around here, you have an amazing amount of flowers.

But you don't do it just for the beautification, although that's nice.

These flowers have a function too.

- They certainly do.

Yeah I put probably 80% vegetables, 20% flowers.

Mainly because the flowers draw in a lot of pollinators.

And you know how important those are to a vegetable gardener.

So, but also beneficial insects which help balance the pest populations.

So I mean yes, I love the way they look and it's fun to play with them and some are edible, and some can be used for medicinal purposes.

But generally, I plant them because they certainly bring in the good buggies.

- Yeah they do.

And let's talk about this one right here because you know, I'm not a huge marigold fan.

It's just what I remember as a kid, which is not a bad thing, but it's just, that's the one thing everybody had.

And the flower's so big relative to the foliage.

But I love this.

And this is the type of a marigold, the one that's more palatable for me.

Talk about his.

This is one of the gem series marigold.

This Orange Gem.

I also have Red Gem and Yellow Gem, the Lemon Gems.

And they actually have a bit of a lemon flavor to them - [Joe] Nice!

- But they're beautiful plants, they're very bushy.

And they're perfect for along the edges of your bed or the corner as you see here.

They take up a little bit of space but the bees, the beneficial insects, they love them.

And I love them too.

I love the ferny kind of leaves.

- [Joe] Yes!

- [Niki] And the tiny little flowers.

And they bloom their heads off so, and I don't dead head.

- Nice.

- No dead heading needed.

So what more could you ask for.

- I think I'll be adding some of these to my garden.

- They're gorgeous.

- Yeah they're nice.

- When I started to design the garden, I took a lot of inspiration, actually from the Growing a Greener World set garden, to be perfectly honest, trying to copy that garden a little bit.

So I love that garden.

The beds were perfect.

So my raised beds sort of reflect that garden quite a bit.

They're made from untreated, local hemlock.

And they're 16 inches tall.

And they're either four by eight, or four by 10, depending where you are in the garden.

And it was a little tricky to design at first, because I knew I wanted a lot of beds.

I knew I had quite a bit of space.

But I wanted it to be beautiful.

I wanted it to be productive and I wanted it to be low maintenance, which was a big thing for me.

So there's a bunch of strategies I use to make my garden low maintenance, which means, yes I can work all day.

I can go to basketball games with my kids, and I can still have 20 raised vegetable beds.

So I do things like deep mulching to reduce weeds and reduce watering, and hold the soil moisture.

I plant things intensively.

Again, and natural mulch to shade the soil, and reduce weed growth as well.

I use raised beds.

Raised beds are a sneaky weapon for vegetable gardeners.

They have far fewer weeds.

They warm up earlier in the spring.

They drain well.

You never walk on top of the soil, like a traditional, in-ground vegetable garden, and therefore, the soil is never compacted.

So it's not like inviting to weed growth.

So raised beds are amazing for reducing the maintenance of a garden.

More initial expense in building but the long term, in terms of maintenance, definitely pays off.

The best gardening advice I've ever been given is to think about the soil.

I think all gardeners know that.

But you really have to pay attention to your soil.

Soil is not just dirt.

It's not just sterile growing medium to grow your plants.

It's alive and we have to encourage and nurture that soil food web.

So I'm constantly feeding my soil, composts, manures, organic fertilizers, chopped leaves, things like that.

And seaweed, where I do live on the coast.

Seaweed is wonderful for the soil.

And I try to encourage lots of earthworms.

A lot of the natural mulches I use like the shredded leaves and the straw also feed the worms, and break down, adding more nutrients to the soil.

So start with the soil and the rest will follow.

[pleasant music] - [Joe] But even with raised beds, strict maintenance, and perfect soil, there's still Nova Scotia's climate, which leads only four months of the year that are guaranteed snow-free.

Not much Niki can do about that.

So she often creates her own microclimate, inside the beds as a way to prolong her growing season.

- In my garden I use a lot of simple strategies to extend my season.

So I can harvest into mid-autumn, late autumn, and even into winter.

But a mini hoop tunnel is like a mini greenhouse.

And for me, where I used raised garden beds, they're four by eight feet or four by 10 feet, they're the perfect size mini greenhouse to top my beds.

And you can use half inch PVC conduit, bent in a U shape over your beds.

You can get a metal bender, and bend your own metal conduit hoops over your bed.

So for covers for your mini hoop tunnels, there's plenty you can choose from, depending on the season.

In spring, I might use a sheet of polyethylene plastic, and greenhouse plastic.

Or maybe I'm gonna use a row cover.

In summer time, I'll use mini hoop tunnels to cover new plantings of seeds I put in and help keep the bed cool and moist while the seeds germinate.

And for that I would use shade cloth or row cover to provide some shade.

Now in fall, again, I'm back to the polyethylene sheeting.

Or a nice thicker medium-weight row cover.

And then for winter, it's definitely the polyethylene sheeting.

Sometimes, also, paired with a row cover for insulation.

Because during winter, the growth of most vegetable plants comes to a standstill.

It's either slows significantly depending on the crop, or they don't grow really once the day length drops below 10 hours.

[pleasant music] - Niki this looks like a great example of what you do to make the most of your garden through the summer, although every bed is full of things actively growing, clearly this bed just got emptied of something, and now you've got these seedlings popping up.

And it looks like you've got some row cover going over.

So tell me what's happening here.

- This was the bed where I had the garlic, which as you know, you harvest usually mid summer, and it comes out.

I also had peas growing up on the trellis.

And they were finished and they were not looking so good.

So I cleaned out the bed, harvested the garlic, and now, I replanted it.

Well, I replenished the soil and then I replanted first in fall and winter harvesting.

- Well it looks great.

And then we've got a several rows of vegetables growing here.

- Yes.

- What are we growing now?

- We've got some daikon radishes for fall and winter harvesting.

And some golden and red beets.

And then I actually also tucked in some pole beans seedlings.

- And you've got the row cover and the shade cloth.

And you're gonna cover that now.

And what is that gonna do for us at this point?

- Well when I'm planting seeds in the summer garden, it can be hard to establish crops, 'cause you gotta water them so much.

- Yeah.

- I mean the soil's dry.

We haven't had rain in weeks, really.

So using a cover, once you've planted up a bed with fresh seeds or seedlings, reduces the stress, reduces the water evaporation, and helps them germinate a lot quicker.

- Okay so-- - So, we're gonna cover it with this.

- This is remade.

This is a really light, poly spun-down fabric.

And then this is shade cloth.

- That's a 50% shade cloth.

You can use 30, you can use 70.

Our whole goal here is to just block a little of the light from drying out the soil, and keeping the seedlings moist.

But you can tell they're growing well.

- Right so and this application's more for the shade than it is warmth like you would use in the fall or winter time.

- Yeah this is almost opposite.

It's kind of cooling and keeping them moist.

[pleasant music] This is just 1/2 inch metal conduit.

I use 1/2 inch PVC conduit.

But how's that?

- That's perfect.

- Perfect, and I mean you can weight the sides down with a few rocks if you want to hold them secure in place.

But it's summer.

I don't expect this to blow off any time soon.

There's no winter storms or hail or anything.

It's all you need.

Then leave this on for a couple weeks until they're established.

- They're off to a great start.

- Yeah.

[pleasant music] - And you mentioned ornamental.

You also do a great job of pairing those edibles with those flowers.

Like right here, we have morning glory.

They're in for the day, right.

But that's a beautiful combination.

Because the purple bean pods, and then purple flowers, nice job there.

- Thank you.

That wasn't accidental.

[laughs] - Right.

- I did plant like a lot climbing nasturtium as well on my tunnels, and the cucamelons, to all mix together.

And then you have just a nice variety on every single tunnel in the garden.

- Yes.

And you're also growing some fun and unusual things.

- Yes.

- Right here you've got ground cherries tucked down against the mulch, next to tomatillos.

And they look very much alike because they're related but they taste very different, yeah?

- They do taste very different.

And we're gonna get you to try your first ground cherry.

- Yeah.

- They're like cousins.

I call them tomato cousins.

They're all in the same family but they have very different flavors.

Although they begin to crop at about the same time.

And some people call ground cherries garden berries because they're so sweet.

- Okay, unlike a tomatillo, which is more for a salsa type.

Yeah.

- Exactly.

And they're delicious.

They're delicious on tacos, and salsa verde, but yeah, these are much different.

Are you ready to try one?

- Let's do it, bring it.

- Okay let's get some of these.

Now do you know why they're called ground cherries?

- No I don't.

I should.

- It's because when they're ripe, they fall to the ground.

- Okay.

- So now you've got, like a tomatillo, they're in a papery husk.

And the husk though, while these are still green, is nice and brown and crisp.

You expose that golden little fruit, and you eat it.

- Alright.

- Mm, oh my gosh.

It's sort of like pineapple, - Yeah.

- Peaches.

[Joe laughs] butterscotch.

- Who doesn't love that?

- Crazy people.

This is delicious, right?

So everybody should be growing these.

And I like tomatillos but you need two plants for cross pollination.

- Mm hm, right.

- You can grow these with one.

They're self-pollinating.

So if you're in an urban garden, you don't have a lot of space, tuck 'em in a container on your sunny deck, and you got ground cherries.

- Well what I wanna know is why wouldn't you grow more than one of those and as big as these get, you really only need to grow two of these.

[laughs] - So true, well I have about a dozen ground cherries tucked in the garden.

- Got it.

- So we get about a 1000 of these [laughs] every summer.

- Well these are delicious.

I'm adding this next season.

- Mm!

So many people tell me that the gardening season is over when summer comes to an end, but I'm just getting started.

Because there are so many things you can tuck in the garden, anytime from midsummer, late summer, early fall, even into October, I'm sowing seeds in my garden for over-wintering spinach, and arugula, and asian greens.

So the gardening system doesn't have to come to a close just because summer is cooling down.

There's actually so many types of vegetables that grow great in the fall.

They appreciate the shrinking daylight.

They appreciate the ample moisture, and the cooler temperatures.

So this is when I grow things like daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, lots of things like that.

As well as beets do really well this time of the year.

Fennel, so turnips.

This is a time when I'm sowing lots of seeds, for root crops as well as leafy greens.

And I'll continue sowing seeds into September, and even into October.

And then some of them are protected by a simple structures.

And some things we harvest out of the garden in autumn, others take us through winter.

So this does not have to be a quiet time in the garden.

Late summer can actually be super busy.

So when summer ends, you might think, alright, the garden's done.

But if you still have root crops in your garden, like beets and carrots or stem crops like leeks, which I love.

They're so sweet and delicious.

You can insulate those by deep mulching them.

And then harvest them all winter long.

So for me, once the ground, kind of is getting close to freezing in late fall, usually late November, early December for me here in zone five, six.

I will deep mulch the ground with a foot of shredded leaves or straw.

And then I cover that with an old bedsheet, or an old robe cover, and then weigh that down with some rocks or some logs.

And then anytime I want those delicious carrots or beets or leeks throughout the winter, I'll lift up the cover, assuming I can find it under the snow, and then I will push back the mulch and then you see the delicious buried treasure underneath.

And I tell ya, there's nothing like a winter carrot because the starch is in the roots.

They convert to sugars, and then they're so sweet and delicious and crunchy.

We call them candy carrots because they're so delicious.

[pleasant music] - [Joe] For Niki, getting a year 'round harvest can often be boiled down to one basic premise that many of us simply forget.

If you're continually sowing seeds and starting plants throughout the year, you'll have more to continually harvest all year long.

- Success in planting to the key to a nonstop harvest.

So for me, I'm always planting new seeds and starting new seedlings under my grow lights to plug into the garden as well.

So if you're in early mid summer when you've harvested your peas, and a lot of your early crops, and your greens, you've got these empty patches in your garden, it's time plug in some fresh plants.

So you could put in more seeds for summer crops like bush beans, or quick growing zucchinis, or maybe you want peas for a fall harvest.

Never leave an empty space in your garden because if you do, mother nature's gonna fill it for yeah, and you're probably not gonna like what she plants.

Another way to grow more food in less space, is to interplant.

And interplanting is simply growing more than one crop in the same space.

So for example, in spring, when I'm planting cabbages, or broccoli and you space them about 18 inches apart, I use all that empty space in between them to start some salad greens.

Maybe I'll get a crop of arugula, or some quick growing cilantro, or some leaf lettuce.

So I'm not leaving that space open for mother nature to fill with weeds.

Instead I'm using it to grow a secondary crop.

Interplanting is such a great way to get more food in your existing space.

You don't always have to dig another bed or build another bed to expand your garden and grow more food.

You can interplant and tuck plants in where maybe you don't realize there's growing space, such along the edges of your bed.

So don't be shy about filling up your space.

Letting your plants grow together a little bit, and then you can harvest more food from your beds.

- Of course, the ultimate season extender and microclimate creator is a full size hoop house, or polytunnel.

This versatile walk-in space does more than give Niki ample room for jumpstarting new crops and overwintering others.

It certainly does that.

But an enclosed 330 some square feet in the garden is so much more.

[pleasant music] I do not even have to ask if you spend a lot of time in here.

- I spend a lot of time [laughs] in here.

I do.

- I would too.

I would too.

- I pull a table up.

I have a pot of tea.

I work on my computer.

I write a lot of my books in here.

It is, it's my happy place.

- And your year round food factory too, I'll bet.

- This is truly a year round food factory.

I mean, this just really allows me to grow so much more food for the family.

In spring, summer, fall and winter.

So in winter, we're harvesting mini, cold tolerant roots.

You saw of course, I have beds filled with new baby vegetables coming along for winter.

There's also, in spring, I'll start planting in February in here.

Once the beds are cleaned out with some new things for spring.

If it's below freezing outside, it's probably about freezing in here.

- [Joe] Sure.

- And summer time, we've got tomatoes and cucumbers and melons and cucamelons and artichokes.

So there's so many wonderful vegetables that maybe don't always do great in the garden for me.

But they thrive in here.

So for this polytunnel, I have to water.

Generally I'm watering every two days.

You can hook up some automated systems.

- [Joe] Yeah you could.

- Of course, and I just haven't gotten there yet.

But I also enjoy hand watering in my garden and in here because as you know, it gives you the chance to inspect for pests, inspect for diseases.

- Oh yeah.

- You know so I think that's important to be a hand waterer, or regular inspections so you can stay on top of problems.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- I love it.

And you know another advantage of an environment like this for people that are prone to pest and diseases, those areas, when you have an environment like this, many times, those pests and diseases don't find their way into here.

At least if you don't bring them in originally.

- [Niki] That's true and because for example, my tomatoes and cucumbers and melons down the middle aisle are grown in a fabric planter.

- [Joe] Right.

- They're filled with potting mix and compost, almost 50-50.

But that gets dumped and composted in with the season.

And then I've got fresh soil the next year.

So I'm not bringing those problems from year to year.

But yeah, I find the tomatoes, we get far more tomatoes in here.

About six weeks earlier than in the garden, which is fantastic.

And then the season lasts longer as well.

Another bonus.

So yeah, if you have the space, it's a wonderful structure to add to your garden.

For me, the garden is not just about providing organic food for my family, which, let's be honest is the main benefit to growing your own food.

I love that I can harvest all of this diversity of vegetables for my family.

But I also just love having fun in the garden.

It's such a great place to hang out.

I know I spend all of my days working in the garden, writing about gardening, and talking about gardening on the radio.

But gardening to me is still something I come back to.

When I'm stressed or busy or tired, I'm never tired of the garden.

It's a place I'll still go and recharge to.

And just being able to go up to the garden in winter, and lift the cold frame top, or walk in the polytunnel and pick some salads or some root crops, or come up in the summer and hide under the bean tunnels.

It recharges me.

Fills my batteries and it just lets me get back to work and do the things I need to do in life.

So like most gardeners, it's my happy place.

And yes, it gives me lots of wonderful food.

But it's also just a great place to hang out and have some fun.

[pleasant music] - As gardeners, we often talk about working with whatever mother nature gives us.

But sometimes, to be succesful, you have to fight back.

And it would be easy to look at a place like Halifax and think that you just can't have a productive, edible garden here.

But after looking at the resourcefulness of how Niki packs every square inch of her garden beds, well it's a living testament that if you're willing to be fearless about your food growing and adapt and experiment, and yes, accept a failure or two along the way.

Perhaps the most important part, you too, no matter where you live, can have a garden that's not only productive.

But one as delicious too.

And I hope that you learned a thing or two that you can apply to your own gardens.

And if you'd like to watch this episode again, you can do that on our website, under the show notes for this episode in the website address that's the same as our show name.

It's growingagreenerworld.com I'm Joe Lamp'l.

Thanks for watching us everybody.

And we'll see you back here next time for more Growing a Greener World.

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