44: Megan Cain | Creative Vegetable Gardener Website | Madison, WI
This episode was originally published in May of 2015. Always good to hear from Megan Cain! Episode 44: Megan Cain | Creative Vegetable Gardener Website | Madison, WI 44. Megan Cain | Creative Vegetable Gardener Website | Madison, WI If you haven’t checked out Megan’ Cain’s http://www.creativevegetablegardener.com (Creative Vegetable Gardener website) I know after this interview you are going to do it ASAP! This has to be one of the best gardening website’s I have ever visited. Not only is it full of valuable gardening information that is sure to lead you to success in your garden but it is presented in a simple and elegant way. Her pages are organized efficiently, the posts have engaging titles like “http://creativevegetablegardener.com/what-not-to-grow/ (What Not To Grow In Your Garden)” and “http://www.creativevegetablegardener.com/make-a-map-of-your-garden/ (Increase Your Garden Success)”, that intrigue you so much you just have to click open. I certainly couldn’t resist “http://www.creativevegetablegardener.com/freezing-red-peppers/ (Save Yourself from $5 Red Peppers in January)” one of my favorite veggies and always so expensive in the store, plus they always feel like they have that wax coating. Tell us a little about yourself. I’m Megan and I live and garden in Madison, WI, pretty far northern climate pretty cold. I own a vegetable garden education business called the http://www.creativevegetablegardener.com (Creative Vegetable Gardener) which helps people get the most out of their garden. So I teach classes and speak around my area in Madison, WI I have online classes and a blog post once a week, and have a few ebooks, and actually just turned one of my online books into a print book. Tell me about your first gardening experience? Since I’m a garden educator, and I spend a lot of time gardening and I know a lot about gardening, I think a lot of people assume I grew up in a farm, but I actually grew up in a row home in Philadelphia, I didn’t know anyone that had a garden, I never even thought about gardening or how vegetables grew. I didn’t have a lot of experience growing up. I do have a very faint memory when I was very young, my mom experimented with having a backyard garden. She was successful at growing mint and she would send me out to the back yard to get mint for the ice tea. I think it had a bigger impact on me then I realized and sort of manifested it on me as I grew up. http://www.creativevegetablegardener.com/about/ (Megan’s About Page) is a must read. What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you? I don’t know how to garden any other way, cause that’s the way I learned how to garden, so sometimes I joke with people I wouldn’t even know how to tell people how to garden non-organically. Paying attention to soil health because that supports all of my plants. Then when I am having an issue in my garden, I start researching it, try to figure out what is the pest, how does it live, or function in the garden, what are the steps I could take to try to get rid of it out of my garden. Looking into any kinds of problems in my garden instead of looking for a quick solution in chemicals, and there are some thing I have stopped trying to grow in my garden because it’s such a struggle to try to grow them organically, I have given myself permission to give up. I consider myself a strategic gardener, and I love to spend time in my garden but I don’t want to waste time in my garden. So I definitely want a garden that produces as much food as possible, and I also want a beautiful garden because my garden is in my front yard, so I see it all the time and out my window. I demand a lot from my garden. I’ve seen a lot of people’s gardens.The majority of people are not getting the most out of their gardens. A lot of people could be more strategic and produce more food. Who or what inspired you to start using organic techniques? Well, I talked a little bit about my earliest gardening Support this podcast