Joe Lamp’l is host of the popular “Joe Gardener Podcast,” and creator of a suite of online courses about gardening—or perhaps you know him from his former long-running public television program called “Growing a Greener World.” Joe gardens in the Atlanta area, and I don’t know any home gardener who starts more seeds each season (think: thousands and thousands, and then thousands more for good measure). He’s the author of “The Vegetable Gardening Book: Your Complete Guide to Growing an Edible Organic Garden from Seed to Harvest” (affiliate link) and I was glad for the chance to recap the year with him.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of Joe’s vegetable gardening guide.
Read along as you listen to the Dec. 30, 2024 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
the year past, and the one ahead, with joe lamp’l
Margaret Roach: Hi, Joe. How are you, Mr. Thousands and Thousands and Thousands and Thousands?
Joe Lamp’l: [Laughter.] I love talking to you for many reasons, but you make me laugh so much. That right there: I’m busted, but it’s true. I can’t deny it.
Margaret: How many?
Joe: And it’s in the thousands somewhere, but closer to three than two.
Margaret: Yeah, that’s normal. Sure, yeah. And how many people in your family? Four-hundred, is that what you said?
Joe: [Laughter.] Yeah, two, three at home right now and so roughly a thousand a person. That’s not normal.
Joe: Rounding up.
Margaret: O.K., so before we get started officially, I think we should say that we’re sort of doing this back and forth on both our shows, aren’t we, this week? [Joe’s interview of me this week is at this link.]
Joe: We are. I love to pick your brain and at the end of the year, as you already said, it’s great to recap. Throughout the year we talk, but it’s really kind of fun to look back over the year together and assess our highs and lows. So we’re doing that with each other this week, and I’m excited to hear a recap of your year.
Margaret: Alright. So people can listen sort of the full story, and we’ll hopefully not duplicate everything and it won’t be completely boring and redundant [laughter].
Joe: It will not.
Margaret: O.K., good. So if you had to characterize your 2024 growing season in a word or two, what would it be? Mine would be parched, I think, because it was dry.
Joe: Mine would be frustrating, due to some of the same reasons. So you gave one, but just the dryness, and the heat.
Margaret: Yeah, and I think that was nationwide, at different times and in different intensities; I think that was nationwide. A lot of gardeners felt things in a way they hadn’t before. Yeah, yeah. So that was one: frustrating, and hot and dry. What about, were there beautiful moments? Were there victories? Were there?
Joe: Yes. The victories, they always come in the fall for me. Let me set the stage again. Just you said, I live in Atlanta, but here we are known for high humidity and high heat, and that doesn’t play nicely with a lot of the things that we like to grow in the summertime, namely edibles. And so we’ll talk about this a little bit more. If you don’t bring it up, I will, but we kind of tough it out through the summertime, in many cases, to get to the fall. And for me, maybe it’s because of that, that I’m such a fan of fall gardening, whether it’s flowers or vegetables or both, but it’s kind of the reward or the dessert after the liver and onion sometimes [laughter] that you put up with to get to that time.
So the high ends for me again this year were just the thrill of the low-maintenance, less-hectic pace of the fall garden for me. And I particularly found it extra peaceful and rewarding this year, because I recognize this year more than any other year that I can recall how much I enjoyed the fall garden. because I wasn’t racing the clock, or dealing with diseases or pest issues like I had been in prior months this year.
Margaret: It’s interesting you say that, because we were just so dry and so frustrated, those two words, in the late summer and all the way through the fall. It was just brutal here as well, which is very unusual for us. But in a way, there was a silver lining for a gardener like myself, who’s been putting off projects. You always have a list, and you do the triage, but you don’t get them all done.
Joe: [Laughter.] Right.
Margaret: Well, it was like the frost-free season and it wasn’t snowing, it wasn’t even pouring as it sometimes is in the fall, or too cold to be out there or anything. It just went on and on and on.
It seemed like September, but with no rain forever and ever and ever, well into I think the end of November. And so I just kept doing projects that had been put off again and again. Do you know what I mean? So that was good in a way to have an extra stretch there in the fall.
Joe: Agreed. And we had a pleasant fall where the temperatures were cooler earlier than normal for us, but without the rain. And what I’ve been used to for many years, most of the years I can remember, is just that classic to me fall weather where you get the gloomy afternoons of light, misty rains in the cooler weather throughout the fall quite a bit. But this year we just didn’t get that until just a couple weeks ago for the first time this season.
So in many ways I got to spend more time out in the fall garden, because it wasn’t so nasty with the weather. And the plants were very happy, and I have to attribute a lot of that to great soil that holds the moisture that it needs. I did not do any supplemental watering, but it was just kind of a magical…and every fall here is beautiful for the fall garden, but this year just more than ever, it was extra special.
Margaret: O.K. So, however… [laughter]–
Joe: Always, however.
Margaret: I know you’re just talking about how you didn’t do any supplemental watering. And I couldn’t—and if we have summers like this from now on, I can’t, because I have a well and I can’t risk the well. When the streams near me are dry, when the stream beds are dry, I mean, I’m not going to use my well, except for essential stuff. So I feel like, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I have to adjust.
I have this big—not big compared to yours—but old, 30-year-old layout of raised beds, conventional raised-bed boxes, 20-by-5 most of them are. Beds that I’ve always grown edibles in and so forth, and they’re out in the full sun, and it’s harder to keep a lot of things happy there, even up north here in the peak season, in the hottest part of the season. So I’m thinking, how am I going to do that, and is that what I want to do out in those boxes forever now? So what about you? Any changes in that?
Joe: Yes, I’m used to filling up 16 large raised beds with all edibles, but in the past couple years I’ve finally come around and said, “Why am I doing that?” Because as you alluded to a minute ago, really, there’s just two of us now, and I’ve got way more food than we can even give away. I mean, we do end up giving it away, but it’s work. And as much as I love growing the food, I’m not a fan of harvesting. It’s not my favorite thing to do. I love the chase or the challenge, but once you get everything ripe and it’s ready to harvest, that’s kind of the goal; you’ve gotten there. And now really it is the bounty that we should be taking advantage of fully. And we do that, I should say, but it’s way more than we can use.
So we are able to give it away, but that requires extra work and time. And I have not enough time, and I’ve done enough work by then [laughter]. So I am actually, as of two years ago, we started dedicating some of our bed space for edibles to flowers, both ornamental and pollinator-attracting native perennials. And we’re migrating more into that side of it. So I’m probably on the record somewhere saying this year, with 2025 coming up next season, I’ll take half of the 16 beds and dedicate them to flowers, which is a first for me. And even then with eight large beds, that’s still going to be more food than my family can consume.
Joe: Yes. And it makes us happy. I say us myself, my family, and Toby, my farm manager who comes out a few times a week. We have noticed how much more the garden comes alive. You hear that expression “plant it and they will come,” and there’s no lie to that. It is so true. And when we first really got into that a couple years ago, and it was way overdue, it was night-and-day difference in that first year. And since then we continue to add in. More than ever we see though the requisite amount, or the consummate amount, of life coming with the extra amount that we’re planting that’s attracting the wildlife. And so we want to keep that going, and that’s exciting.
Margaret: So that’s a good idea. So I guess when we’re shopping the seed catalogs this winter, we should have an eye out to some things that would be good for that sort of not high maintenance, but pollinator-attracting annuals. I assume a lot of these are annuals?
Joe: Both. We are doing both annuals and perennials. We dedicated perimeter beds within the garden that we built a couple of years ago, and we got those dedicated to both ornamentals and native perennials. And so we’re working through the layout, and what stays and where do we move things around for sun and their preferences. But we have cut flowers in the garden for personal use. It’s not like we’re selling them or anything like that, so we wouldn’t have room for that, but we don’t need a lot of room for that. And so my heart is in growing more native perennials in and around the garden.
Margaret: Some of my raised beds, as I said, are 30 years old or whatever, and some of them are not in good shape, and some of them I’ve repaired and replaced one wall or another and so forth. And I was also thinking, well, do I keep the ones that are kind of a mess? Do I replace them, or do I scale down? I know you’ve been doing grow bags on the periphery, I think outside the fenced garden or near your greenhouse. I don’t know how you like that. I mean, are you also thinking of scaling down over all at all, or how about your beds? Are you doing anything needing repair?
Joe: Oh my gosh. It’s like you’re here. Yes.
Margaret: Oh yeah, me, too.
And so I have to make a really hard decision, and I don’t really know what I’m going to do yet, Margaret. I’m not going to give up the space. I’ll always grow in that area and I’ll probably keep raised beds, but I can’t afford to duplicate the beds that I have because the cost of 6-by-6 cedar timbers now, it was expensive 15 years ago; now I don’t even think I could go there. So I don’t have a replacement option yet.
Margaret: It makes every tomato and Brussels sprout quite pricey [laughter].
Joe: What was that book? “The $68 Tomato” or whatever? Now it’s $268.
Margaret: Exactly, exactly.
Joe: Yeah.
Margaret: One of the things I was able to do with the stretched season, with the fall that just went on forever, was replace a kind of retaining wall at one end of the property that was really rotting. That was sort of like railroad tie-ish looking large old timbers, kind of like what you’re saying, but even bigger, 8-by-8’s. And I was really shocked at the price of the new ones. And if you don’t want to use a treated product, it’s really tricky. It’s really tricky, because what do you have locally that’s milled or that’s cut locally that you can use that has even 10 or 15 years’ supposed rot resistance and so forth.
Joe: And you’re right. What is that product? I will say I’m jealous of a friend, a gardener neighbor of mine who lives 15 minutes away, who’s a great gardener, and he has like me, 6-by-6 sized…They’re not timbers. They’re made out of granite. He has granite raised beds in the shape of timbers, squared-off timbers. They’re to die for and you will die before they ever go away. That’s the thing.
They’re permanent, and I haven’t priced them yet, but it’s on my list to investigate. I doubt that I could afford them, but that would be the answer for beds in perpetuity with not being treated and locally sourced, but to be determined, but I mean, it’s out there. It’s crazy.
Margaret: The other thing: So I think we’re both in the same fine-tuning both what we’re planting, also the condition of the beds and what we’re going to do to tweak them or reinvest in them or repair them or whatever, or replace them. The other thing: My water gardens. I’m like Miss Popularity because I’m the only person around here with water gardens. I mean, I’m not in a densely populated area, but nevertheless, I get a lot of visitors to my garden that people down the road don’t get, because I have a couple of in-ground water gardens that I’ve had for a long time. So I’m kind of like a great place to get a drink on a hot day [laughter].
Joe: I can attest to that. I’ve seen it.
Margaret: Right, the local bar.
Joe: The local everything.
Margaret: But those need some repair. I was thinking repair. And the one project I didn’t do, even in this extended fall because of the heave-and-thaw, heave-and-thaw coming of the winter, I didn’t want to do stonework on the edges of ponds and things like that, that some of the stuff needs. The coping along the edges needs repair, and that’s the kind of thing that you want to do when then the season’s going to be stable for six months, do you know what I mean? You don’t want to do it before a big 2 feet in the ground of frost heaves it up again. You want things to settle. So that wasn’t a good time to do that. But at any rate, my water gardens need some tweaking, but thank goodness they’re here.
Joe: And don’t you love them, Margaret? I’d seen them in pictures before I saw them in person, and every time I come, I just see that life that you’re talking about, and the sound, and just the element of the moving water that brings so much life to it, including sometimes for you, I think bears, right, don’t they?
Margaret: [Laughter.] Everybody. Yeah. Yeah, everybody. Yeah.
Joe: Well, that’s on my list. That’s on my list for 2025. I would love to have a water garden like yours, and I hope to. The plans are in place right now, but it’s been on my list for a long time. But I’m more serious than ever in getting that done, along with a deer fence, which is the other project. The other two major projects are colliding as to who gets done first. But I think the fence is going to have to come first, because otherwise I’m going to have some of the same visitors you will that don’t get an invitation.
Margaret: And I do have a fence, and that was a big investment, maybe 20-something years ago, and I’ve never looked back. It was the best thing I ever did was put a fence around the place. Yeah, no, that’s definitely a good idea.
Well, and with water features, I mean, I think everyone doing their looking around the garden, making a list for what they can do better next year, a friend who was moving gave me a kind of a concrete-ish stone bird bath thing on legs. It’s kind of Japanese-y looking; he said, “Oh, do you want this?” And I just kind of put it out on the patio where it’s not near the other water features, and the birds just go crazy for it. It’s hilarious.
So it’s like even I learned, even having had water all these years, I learned we can place small amounts of water around the place and really do a great service, because some of them will use it to bathe and some will use it to drink and different features for different things.
And when I listen to podcasts all over and a lot from the U.K. everyone that ever mentions, “What’s the best thing you ever did for your garden? What’s the most important thing you ever did?” Almost every time, the first thing out of their mouth is a simple water feature. We’re not even necessarily taliking moving water, but just a place that holds water that allows for the wildlife to get what they need.
Margaret: So any other sort of resolves? I mean, I’m on a campaign against invasive things, and we’re always all on that, but I’m being more… Like there’s a bed in the front that had that chameleon plant that was such an ornamental years ago, Houttuynia cordata, and it’s just a nightmare of all nightmares. And I’ve tried 50 times to get rid of it and so on and so forth. I’ve tarped it and solarized it and mowed and whatever, suffocated it with cardboard and dug it out a million times. [Laughter.] But this time I really, really, really, really, really, really dug it out. And I’m leaving the bed; I’ve made a commitment, you can hear me say it out loud-
Joe: O.K.
Margaret: …the bed is staying empty for at least a couple of years. I took out all the plants. Nothing can go in there because it is going to re-sprout and I’m going to need to redo it and re-clean it and re-clean it. Right. Sometimes we have to let go of that it is going to be an eyesore. It’s going to be this empty bed in a prominent spot, but I’ve got to do that to beat this plant, this invasive, this rhizomatous perennial.
Joe: The alternative is you don’t do it, and you let that invasive perennial come back with a vengeance, and it will. So you’ve got to bite the bullet and suck it up for a couple years, and hopefully that will do the trick. Fingers crossed.
Margaret: Do you have any other things, not necessarily invasive, but other things that are sort on your list of resolves?
Joe: Yes. This year I’ve really grappled with… I’ve always been cognizant of the importance of leaving the leaves, and that’s been a big topic throughout the fall and for good reason. And I’ve got a 5-acre wooded, semi-wooded property here. So I have no shortage of leaves, but I’ve never collected the leaves from my own property and moved them or shred them and used them for mulch elsewhere. They just mulch where they fall.
But in the area that I live, even although it’s rural around my immediate area, there’s a lot of subdivisions within five minutes from here, and they’re kind of required to bag up their leaves and set them at the curb, and then the trash service comes and picks them up literally and takes them to the landfill. There’s not even an option to take them to a composting facility. So as a big fan of leaf mulch, I take my Saturdays, and I’ve talked to you about this in the past, but those fall Saturdays I’m driving around to these bags on the curb and putting them in my pickup truck and driving them back to my place. And for the early years, I would collect as many bags as I needed, and I’d shred them and put them in my leaf corral, and I’d use them in the following spring.
Well, over time, I evolved to still collect as many leaves as I could in the course of a day over three Saturdays in the fall, November. But I would release, what I called “free the leaves,” into my native landscape beds, probably about 80 percent of them. And the other 20 was my compromise to myself that I could shred those and not feel guilty about it, because all of the leaves that I had collected were destined for the landfill, anyway. And I was releasing 80 percent back into my property, hoping that along with it went the overwintering wildlife. But even this year, I struggled with even shredding any of them. And that’s not to make anybody feel bad about that.
Joe: Even with that small percentage. So I’ll just tell you real quick what my resolution, my accidental resolution, had turned out to be for this year. And I’m feeling good about this. I just chose not to for several reasons. I chose not to mulch anything this year, and just take a year off and try to keep figuring it out.
Well, in the meantime, an acquaintance of mine who lives nearby has a lawn service, and during the fall, his crew is sucking up the leaves from his clients’ property or blowing them out to the street, and then he bought a big leaf vacuum on a big trailer, and they suck up and they go into the trailer already shredded. Well, he knew my love for shredded leaves, so he reached out to me two weeks ago and said, “Hey, you need any leaves?” And I said, “Well, yeah, I don’t have any this year, but are they shredded?” And they said they are. And I said, “Bring ’em.” So Margaret, I got the biggest Christmas present I’ve ever had.
Margaret: I was going to say Christmas came early in Atlanta.
Joe: It did, and now it’s come twice, because he knows I’m his dumping source, basically, because here’s the thing, I am just intercepting the handoff because all the sucking and the shredding was done before I even knew about it. And nothing I do or say is going to change what he’s going to be doing.
So he just is now using me as his drop-off spot. And so now I have about literally 10 years’ worth of what it would’ve taken me to do if I were collecting and shredding, and now they’re just dumping and there they are.
Margaret: I love it.
Joe: I love it. I love it too. [Laughter.]
Margaret: I want to say that I’ve got to go find out now which of the mow-and-blow companies around here has one of those machines that wants to dump their leaves, their shredded leaves, here.
Joe: These, well, that’s the end of, that’s the rest of the story. Thank you for saying that because for me, surely this is taking place around the country.
Margaret: Everywhere.
Joe: And so for those who are struggling with the same issues, that may be an option for you.
Margaret: So we could get free mulch essentially, or compostable material; organic material. Yeah. I’m going on the lookout [laughter], but Joe, I always love talking to you. And as I said earlier in the show, first of all, I’m going to come be a guest on yours this week as well, on your podcast. And we’re going to do a giveaway of your book, the vegetable gardening book. Not that you grow a lot of vegetables or anything, or have any experience with that.
Joe: [Laughter.] Thank you.
Margaret: And ho, ho ho and whatever.
Joe: Right back at you. Thanks, Margaret.
(All photos courtesy of Joe Lamp’l, from his garden.)
enter to win a signed copy of ‘the vegetable gardening book’
I’LL SEND A signed copy of “The Vegetable Gardening Book: Your Complete Guide to Growing an Edible Organic Garden from Seed to Harvest” by Joe Lamp’l to one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below: Any resolves for the new garden year ahead, or reflections from 2024’s?
No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll select a random winner after entries close Tuesday Jan. 7, 2025 at midnight. Good luck to all.
(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
prefer the podcast version of the show?
