Sowing Seeds to Help You Grow Food and Good Health

I've sprouted a Food Gardening Community to live sustainably, save money, use plants for health/wellbeing, food security & avoid chemicals

Mar 23, 2025

Welcome to my Substack platform. I invite you to join me. I've been writing popular blogs on my website for 15 years and building an online library of articles to help people grow a sustainable organic food garden.

Many people suffering from health issues want to grow and use plants for healing and preventative medicine. Growing a food garden makes sense with the escalating cost of living. Having deeper connections can help us all with greater food security, managing weather challenges, avoiding the toxic corporate food system and growing confidence in our ability to be more self-reliant and sustainable.

This platform is an opportunity to hang out regularly together … like leaning over the virtual ‘fence’ to chat with other food gardeners and share our plant parenting journeys. The ups and downs, frustrations, challenges, harvests and joys. Make connections, share seeds of hope, forage for ideas and inspiration, find balance and joy in a safe space, and learn from each other.

I focus on growing edible, medicinal and useful plants and maximising the functionality in small urban spaces. I’m a very intentional gardener and a tough ‘landlord.’ With limited ‘real estate’ in my garden, plant ‘tenants’ have to give me a good return on my investment in time, money and energy! If not, they get composted, mulched, reinvented as liquid fertiliser, swapped or gifted.

Plants have to perform at least two beneficial functions, or I’ll ‘lease’ their space out to a more valuable plant ‘resident’. I’m looking forward to introducing you to some of my VIPs (Very Important Plants), my short-term ‘holiday’ stay annual tenants and my long-lived perennial occupants.

I’m keen to take you on virtual tours into my garden throughout the seasons, with all the plants and insect characters that live there. I will show you how I deal with the high-maintenance plant ‘princesses’ that can be extremely demanding but worth the effort. We’ll look at the humble herbs that gift us beautiful healing properties and how to use them as everyday remedies. Plus, my favourite low-maintenance plants and flowers that make gardening a joy.

The garden may feel like a battlefield at times, but there’s no need to use chemical weapons. I’ll introduce you to the common critters in our gardens, including ‘pest’ insects, pollinators and beneficial insects. They all have roles to play. Pests are clues that there’s an imbalance in nature. Their presence allows us to play ‘detective’ and discover how to restore balance. Your garden guardians, pest patrollers and disease destroyers are there to assist.

We’ll also dig into how to get help from the free workers in your soil food web - like magnificent microorganisms and fabulous fungi. We’ll join the dots between human health, nutrient-dense food, pest and disease-resistant plants and biodiverse, mineralised soil. Our health and the food we eat are linked to the health of the plants that grow in our soil. I’ll share strategies to rejuvenate nutrient-deficient, depleted soils that produce sick plants and diseased people. It’s exciting to work with nature rather than fight it.

Gardeners play a vital role as soil stewards and plant parents. As caretakers, we can create a healthy ecosystem and resilient gardens. In turn, we are rewarded with an abundance of nutritious food and good health so we can do the things we love.