This is a collaborative blog consisting of Organic Gardening Magazine Editors and staff and Official OG Test Gardeners.
Our purpose is to let readers know what’s new at Organic Gardening. We’ll share our successful techniques and tips, update you on what’s happening in our gardens, and tell you our latest gardening conundrums.

Organic Gardening Staff

Ethne Clarke

Ethne Clarke is Editor-in-Chief of Organic Gardening.  She is a professionally trained horticulturist, garden historian, author, and she speaks internationally about garden design and history. Prior to joining Organic Gardening, Clarke was the garden editor of Traditional Home and a contributing editor to House and Garden. She has also contributed to The American Gardener, Horticulture, Pacific Horticulture, Garden Design, Gardens Illustrated, Hortus, Homes and Gardens, Country Life, and RHS The Garden.

Clarke is the author of fifteen books on landscape history and gardening. Her most recent work is a revised edition of Hidcote: The Making of a Garden, which was originally published in 1989 as the first biography of Major Lawrence Johnston.  This revised edition celebrates the continuing influence of the garden and the impact made by an expatriate on the course of garden design in his adopted country.  Clarke received the 1987 Angel Literary Award for Art of the Kitchen Garden while living abroad for 30 years as an American expatriate in England.  She has a Master of Philosophy in Art and Design from De Montfort University, Leicester, England and currently lives in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

Therese Ciesinski

Therese Ciesinski, managing editor, has been with Organic Gardening magazine for ten years. She has a weakness for roses, lilacs and blueberries, but her mostly shaded lot demands an appreciation of hydrangeas, hostas and sometimes lettuce. In addition to gardening she enjoys writing, travel, reading, and log-cabin kitsch. She shares her garden with her cats, Skid and Bruiser, and a lettuce-eating squirrel.

Doug Hall

To the amusement of his new neighbors, the first thing Doug planted on moving from Iowa to Pennsylvania was a small plot of sweet corn. (Midwesterners take their corn seriously.) Doug is Senior Editor of Organic Gardening and oversees the magazine’s test garden.

Nancy Rutman

If we need a cabbage illustration from a Victorian seed catalog or a collection of postcards depicting floral clocks, Nancy can probably find it among her collection of paper Americana and ephemera. As the only Lehigh Valley native on staff, she also keeps us informed about local history and culture. And she never passes up an opportunity to sing.

Denise Gee

Denise Gee grew up in historic Natchez, Mississippi, where, behind her family’s downtown Victorian home, she spent many an hour with her grandmother, Freddie Bailey, making an abundance of preserves, jellies, and chutneys (with fruit from local gardens) to sell to tourists. It was there in Natchez that she that first learned the joy of cooking, entertaining, gardening, historic preservation, and story telling. She ultimately followed in the path of her both her grandmother and cousin, design & entertaining guru Lee Bailey—with whom she collaborated on Lee Bailey’s Southern Food and Antebellum Houses (winner of a 1990 James Beard Award)—by becoming a writer and foodie. Denise has worked as a foods editor and stylist with Southern Living and Coastal Living magazines, and as a home design editor for Better Homes and Gardens. She also has written two books—the most recent being Porch Parties: Cocktail Recipes & Easy Ideas for Outdoor Entertaining (Chronicle Books, 2010), and the first being Southern Cocktails (Chronicle Books, 2007). She makes her home in Dallas, Texas, with her husband, photographer Robert Peacock, and their standard poodle, Alfie. Each time she looks out from her kitchen and living room windows to see the well-established fruit trees around her old home, she thinks of family—and the importance of savoring the good (organic) life.

Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson is the Art Director for Organic Gardening magazine.

Christa Neu

Christa has a small vegetable garden and a big camera bag. She likes to take garden photos just after sun-up, when the light is very nice.

Eric Hurlock

Eric believes that the best garden is always next year’s garden, but he hasn’t written off this year’s garden yet. Coming from a long line of gardeners and musicians, Eric finds inspiration in the soil of South Coventry, Pennsylvania, where he gardens and plays music with his wife, daughter, and dog. His gardening goal for this year is to grow giant pumpkins.

Amanda Kimble-Evans

Amanda Kimble-Evans grew up surrounded by small farms and large gardens in rural Pennsylvania, and was raised to have a close relationship with the food on her plate. She stumbled into organic gardening in her parents’ vegetable patch where she spent an inordinate amount of time gnawing on dirt-smeared carrots and milky raw corn-on-the-cob. Amanda is now a mama nurturing her family with no additives or preservatives, and a writer-editor specializing in gardening and farming, food, family and the environment.

Katie Walker

Katie is new to Organic Gardening, both the magazine and the concept. In her 10×15 community garden plot and random assortment of containers, she wants to grow…something, anything at all, really. She hopes that you will help her in her experience as a newbie gardener.

Organic Gardening Regional Test Gardeners

Linda Crago

Zone 6a (Northeast) Wellandport, ON, Canada.

I have been growing and selling organically grown produce for 13 years now, and specialize in heirloom vegetables. I have done a CSA in the past, but now focus on restaurant sales, year round. I grow in unheated hoophouses in the winter providing an abundance of winter-hardy greens. In spring my focus turns to heirloom tomato transplants which has perhaps become the heart and soul of my business, as are the actual sales of the fruit.  I am known as “The Tomato lady’ in our area-Southern Ontario. But there are certainly many other veggies I grow and I love to track down “new” heirlooms from around the world in my spare time.

www.treeandtwig.ca

Leslie Doyle

Zone 8 (Southwest)
Las Vegas, NV
Leslie’s garden is in what most people consider a very inhospitable climate – Las Vegas, Nevada in the Mojave Desert. But, in spite of the heat and dry climate, she grows every vegetable she and her friends want to eat – even huge and delicious tomatoes – pounds and pounds of them. Her organic garden is in the yard of her half-acre residential lot. The garden and test beds are filled with garden soil made for her locally, to her specs, by Gro-Well, and named Tomato Lady Soil, and she blends her own fertilizer in an old compost tumbler.

Her 3 urban chickens, kept for the eggs, help to fertilize and to compost the garden scraps they eat – and recently she founded the Las Vegas Urban Chicken Keepers Coop Tour – known as CLUCK.

John Lewis

Zone 6a (Northeast)
Newport, RI

John Lewis is Digital Services Librarian and Adjunct Professor in the Management and Administration Of Justice Departments at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI. He grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts and his primary garden is located there on his uncle’s property. He also has smaller raised bed and container gardens in Onset, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island. He has been an avid gardener for over fifteen years. His favorites include tomatoes, peppers and kale.

Caleb Melchior

Zone 6 (Midwest)
Perryville, MO
Caleb Melchior is a freelance garden writer and photographer.  He spends summers at Sugar Creek Gardens, a specialty perennial nursery in Saint Louis, while maintaining extensive ornamental and edible plantings at his home garden in southeast Missouri.  During the cooler months, he studies landscape architecture at Kansas State University in chilly Manhattan, Kansas.  His current plant fascinations include hellebores, hardy orchids, and unusual small trees.

Leslie Halleck

Zone 8 (South)
Dallas, TX

Debbie Leung

Zone 8 (West Coast)
Olympia, WA

After gardening for 25 years at my current location where, for about half that time, I grew produce and cut flowers for the farmers market and a CSA, I’m looking forward to moving closer to town and friends. My family includes an Australian Shepherd, old kitty, a rooster and five hens of various heirloom breeds. We will be closer to Puget Sound where frosts are less severe and I can ripen hardy figs! In summer, our northern days are long, but any heat buildup in this moderate maritime climate usually dissipates in the evenings—very comfortable for gardeners and great for growing greens and berries, but not conducive to ripening most tomatoes, peppers or melons. Good thing I like eating greens of all kinds! I’m always searching for new, interesting and tasty edibles that will thrive and ripen here.

Barbara Jane Miller

Zone 5 (Mountains and Plains)
Boulder, CO 80303

Barbara Jane Miller lives and  gardens in Zone 5 at an altitude of 5240′ at Boulder, Colorado.  I have  about 1/3 of an acre in gardens, both ornamental and edible and use a  large (36′ X 18′) plastic covered gothic arch hoophouse to extend my  gardening season.   I mulch heavily with rottables such as spoiled hay  and straw, lawn clippings, spent brewery barley, and most especially,  autumn leaves.  Last fall I collected (and have already used up) 1600  big plastic bags of leaves on my garden.   Also 60+ chickens and 2 goats  contribute their manure to enrich the soil.   My gardens have never been  tilled and the worms are huge and abundant.  Happiness is a rich soil  full of tilth!
http://www.frontrangeliving.com/garden/BJMiller.htm

Andres Mejides

Zone 10 (South)
Homestead, FL

Don Boekelheide

Zone 7b (South)
Charlotte, NC

Bill Nunes

Zone 9 (West Coast)
Gustine, CA
When Bill closed his photography business after 30 years, he already had a good start on returning to his roots in farming. Bill grows a year-round variety of vegetables on a two-acre CSA garden in California’s hot Central Valley.

While the garden is not certified organic, all inputs and practices follow or surpass organic rules. Seed-saving, insectary plants, composting, cover crops and companion plants all contribute to the health of Contented Acres Produce and the local folks who support the garden.

Kathy Shaw

Zone 4/5 (Midwest)
Neenah, WI
We live about 30 miles from Green Bay, Wisconsin and garden on an acre in a low-lying agricultural area which shortens our growing season compared to the surrounding towns. My husband, Pat, and I are members the Wisconsin Master Gardener Association and have always gardened organically though we became passionate about it ten years or so ago when we quit rototilling and began growing all the fruits and vegetables we eat annually. I love to find and create new recipes using our fresh and our preserved produce and I’m always on the look out for the next best pickle recipe.

Jackie Smith

Zone 4 (Midwest)
Belle Plaine, MN
Jackie Smith was the OG Gardener of the Year in 1987 – the same year she became a University of Minnesota Extension Master Gardener. She conducts vegetable and flower variety trials at her farm along the Minnesota River and now coordinates the Master Gardener program in two metropolitan MN counties.

Nan Sterman

Zone 10 (Southwest)
Olivenhain, CA
I’ve lived most of my life in Southern California, though I’ve gardened from Berkeley almost to Mexico, and on the east coast from DC to the outer banks of North Carolina. I was part of the “original” sustainability movement of the 1970’s and learned my organic gardening, composting, and animal husbandry at the Integral Urban House in Berkeley California. I’ve carried those lessons through my entire life, both personal and professionally.

Today, I am a one of the west’s best-known horticulturists and gardening experts devoted to low water landscape appropriate for California’s dry, Meditteranean climate. I also design gardens and coach gardeners.

I am author of California Gardener’s Guide V II and Waterwise Plants for the Southwest. I write for the LA Times, Sunset, the Union Tribune, Organic Gardening and many other publications. I am gardening expert for These Days, the morning talk show on public radio in San Diego. I also host Emmy award winning A Growing Passion, a TV show about gardens and gardening. I teach classes and lecture about gardening throughout the west.

Michelle Zettel

Zone 3 (Mountains and Plains)
Challis, ID

I live in what is called a high mountain desert (Zone 3, with less than 9 inches of rain per year). We are over 5000 feet in elevation, so things can be challenging here. Late spring frosts continue into the first two weeks of June, and I have had killing frosts by the end of August. A greenhouse is a real plus around here! I love the garden; I always feel good when I am there, and if that’s not healthy I don’t know what is. I also love the fact that my two sons will eat anything I grow. The garden has convinced both boys that veggies really are good. They are always ready to go out and pick something for dinner! That is the best reason to have a garden. I preserve/freeze/can/store most of the garden produce. I also participate in a local farmers’ market with whatever surplus there is.