Now that the final frost has passed, it's time to plant your seedlings out in the garden! But before you get planting - have you hardened off your seedlings? If you're wondering what that is, you're not alone. Most gardeners probably don't do it, but it can help increase your plants' survival rates and set you up for the best garden yet. Hardening-off seedlings is essentially exposure-therapy to the real world. Most seedlings are grown in a nice, cozy environment with consistent light, consistent watering, and consistent temperatures - this is not the case with the Great Outdoors as it threatens your plants lives with light that is 10x more powerful than any LED, temperatures that swing wildly, and not to mention the wind, bugs, rabbits, or squirrels that may be waiting to strike. When we harden plants off, we will begin exposing them to the real world for about a week before doing a complete transition to outdoor life. You will want to start off with a small amount of time, let's say an hour, and then gradually increase the time the seedlings spend outdoors until you think they're ready to make the move. Hope you enjoyed the podcast & please let me know if you have any questions & I'll be happy to help!

On today's podcast I answer 5 gardening questions beginning with When & Why I started gardening. After I discuss my origin stories around gardening, I dive into more gardening specific topics such as: What seeds can I plant now? What is the #1 most challenging part of growing Tomatoes? What are some gardening tips and tricks? I hope you enjoy this podcast & if you have any further questions - call into the station or drop me a comment & I'll add it into the next episode!

In today's episode of Mind Body Garden I talk about how to stay sane in this crazy world we are living in. When I began this podcast, I didn't intend for it to spiral into maintaining a positive perspective during quarantine from the Coronavirus situation - but I know it's on a lot of people's minds and the thing that is threatening everyone's mental health.

For me, having a morning routine has greatly helped me to stay sane & happy despite the monotony & uncertainty of the times we are living in. My morning routine involves writing Morning Pages (3 pages of stream of consciousness writing), and then ideally it would follow with creating content - either a podcast or a blog. Lately I have been waking up late and rushing my morning routine - often missing the podcasting or other tasks that I want to complete. I find that not executing on something that I planned on doing is more of a drag on my psyche than anything else, so I knew that it was time to reclaim the morning routine - and my positive perspective.

What do you do to maintain perspective & find comfort in these crazy times?

As we prepare to plant our gardens out for the season, there are a few options for how you can garden this year. In this podcast I talk about the pros & cons of 3 different types of gardening: Growing in the Soil Growing in Raised Beds Growing in Containers (or in my case, Root Pouches & Grow Bags) There are challenges for each type of gardening, but you have to find the benefits that help you & your situation the most. I found that I needed to grow in Raised Beds or Root Pouches to save my plants from wet feet, diseases & fungus that live in my soils, and from the seasonal attack of grubs, weeds, and whatever else nature can throw your way. Hope this podcast helps you & would love to hear from you if you have any questions or anything I can do to help you grow your best garden this year!

In this podcast I talk about what I've been doing for the last month of lockdown and how I am staying sane. A lot of it revolves around gardening - something that I was obsessed with before all of this chaos happened in the world. Now that it has happened, tons of people are wanting to grow their own food and become self-sustainable. Starting a garden can be intimidating but I hope to guide you through the process of starting a garden whether you are growing from seed, or planting directly in the ground.

Gardening can be intimidating when you consider all the factors - watering the plants, fertilizing them, making sure they get enough light. And all of that is just while they are seedlings, wait until you plant everything out in the garden and have to worry about pests like bugs, squirrels, rabbits, and deer!

My goal through this podcast was to break down some of the stigma around the amount of work it takes to garden. It does take "work", but a better word for it would be "care". It requires a great deal of care & intentional acts that promote growth and help the plants to flourish.

April is creeping to a close and gardening is on everyone's mind as we wonder what the future holds with the situation revolving around us currently. I think that uncertainty, a "prepper instinct", and the need to be self-sustainable is driving people to want to provide more for themselves - a big part of this is through Gardening.

Let me know what I can do to help you grow your best garden yet!

MAKE AMERICA GARDEN AGAIN

It has been a long time coming, but I was finally able to record a podcast with my brother Adam Neth. Adam is a personal trainer, natural bodybuilder, and has a complete passion & obsession with Fitness.

On today's podcast I interview Adam and dive into his origin story to learn more about how he got interested in weight lifting and what he is doing now - working as a personal trainer at a gym, plus he has his own personal clients that he manages through online training. After that we talk about some of the modifications you can make to your home workouts to make them effective - even if you don't have a ton of equipment like machines or dumbbells.

If you're interested in learning more about the different lifting programs that you can implement to build strength, power, and muscle - tune in and make sure you have a notebook handy because Adam is super knowledgable and there's a lot to learn in this episode!

Hope you enjoy the podcast & drop your questions in the comments - or call into the station if you listen on Anchor - and we'll be happy to help & elaborate in a future podcast as well!

Lately my mornings have been preoccupied by writing my Morning Pages, so I have neglected the podcast somewhat, but I begin this episode by talking about my new creative outlet. 

After that - it's all gardening!

Last weekend my dad brought the tiller down to me and I began a massive overhaul of the garden that involved moving all 250+ Root Pouches out of the garden, dumping the busted pots, removing old ground cover, tilling the soil, re-grading, and finally re-covering the garden with 3 ounce woven ground cover fabric. This will serve as a weed barrier that should last 5-7 years, plus it gives the garden a beautiful, clean aesthetic that has been lacking for quite some time. Best of all - no more weeding.

I finish up the episode talking about the plants that I just transplanted yesterday, March 28th. Those included: lettuce, spinach, arugula, broccoli, & green onions. Although I'm in growing zone 6, and could get frosts up until May 15th, I'm taking my chances with the mild spring - plus these crops are all very cold hardy - and if all else fails, I've got frost blankets as a backup!

Let me know if you have any questions or anything I can do to help with you gardening season this year! And I would be humbled if you enjoyed the podcast and could subscribe to my channel - Mind Body Garden!

This warm start to March has me itching to get out in the garden! It's still just a lil bit early, but with the warmer weather approaching, now's the Time to prep your garden for the growing season. For me this means grading my garden so that it is more level & has the proper drainage. Once I get the land situated, I'll be covering it with woven ground cover fabric. This will completely eliminate weeding, give me a grid to space plants without a tape measure, and it'll provide a much cleaner aesthetic to the garden. Today's episode dives into these topics and more of what's growing in the garden and in the project portion of my brain 👨‍🌾💪🌱

In today's episode I dive into 5 gardening questions that I pulled from Quora. These questions range from what I'm growing in my garden this year to what you can plant in a 10 x 10 garden plot, and some tomato growing tips as well. In the last question I talk about how to make money from your garden. This then leads me down a path of how Gardening 4 Gains was started, the origin stories and how I feel that I've optimized my growing operations this year in order to maximize the efficiency of the size of the Garden in relation to what customers actually want. The biggest differentiator will be timing harvests out for seasonality and ensuring continual harvests this season - which is something that I've executed rather poorly on in the past. I hope this helps you with your gardening journey, but if you have specific gardening questions you want answered - let me know and I'll add it into the next episode 🎙️🌱

Today is officially known as CSA Day - the day to sign up for your CSA! CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture - essentially it involves paying a farmer ahead of the season for a bi-weekly box of fresh produce from my garden. This model allows the farmer to use the funds for seeds, land, and supplies in preparation for the season ahead. In today's episode I talk about the progress of the seeds I've planted and talk about the next few rounds of planting I have planned out. I also discuss the difference between the grow rack at AM Leonard (using fluorescent lights) versus the grow rack in my personal Plant Lab (Stratum LED light bars) 🌱💡

The last week has been extremely wet here in Ohio and yesterday we got a few inches of snow ❄️ Despite spotty winter weather, we have had an extremely mild winter - warm temperatures and lots of moisture. In today's episode I talk about the effects this will have on the spring and summer gardening seasons and discuss a few ways that I plan on using to manage the pest populations naturally, organically, and using beneficial insects as much as possible 🐞🥊🦟

I talk a lot about my morning routines, but this week I have been focusing less on the time I wake up and more on the quality of the time I spend sleeping. Rather than force myself to get up and function on 6 hours of sleep, I have forced myself to set my alarm to allow for 7 and a half hours of sleep. Every single morning I have woken up before my alarm clock and have felt extremely refreshed & highly energetic and happy through the day. Aside from sleep I also casually slip in a little rant on the meaning of life 😁 hope you enjoy and would love to hear any feedback you have for the podcast - what do you wanna hear me rant more about?

Last week I planted the first seeds of the season and they're already popping up like crazy in the various trays I planted them in. In this episode I talk about the different seed starting soil mixes I'm using including Berger BM2 and PittMoss Plentiful. Pitt Miss is a super interesting product where they replace peat moss with recycled paper. It's a much more sustainable alternative to peat and seems to produce some healthy onion seedlings so far! And although I like the sustainability value prop of the Pitt Moss, I am obsessed with the quality and consistency of the Berger BM2 germination mix. I also talk about the various trays that I'm using for propagation including 72 and 288 cell plug trays, plus some more hydroponics-type of seed starting supplies such as the HydroFloat and Grow Plugs, and the Oasis Rootcubes.

Wow. Today was a rant for the books. I'm not sure what got into me but when I started talking about my new theme for the year, "Make America Garden Again", I got off on a tangent about putting in the work and then about doing things that you enjoy. Hope you enjoy this little rant and would be super humbled by your support for Gardening 4 Gains by purchasing a make America Garden again t-shirt from my website 😁🙏💪🌱

Don't you love those mornings where you actually wake up early & have time to do the things you wanna do? Today was one of those mornings for me. I kicked it off with Morning Pages while guzzling coffee, then I got down to business and started some seeds 😁 It's technically still a little early to start seeds, but I'm banking on a warm, mild spring, planting cold-tolerant crops, and I will be utilizing frost blankets and low tunnels once I plant everything outdoors. Something about this season feels so different - in a good way. I have a super clear plan, I've got the experience from the past few seasons, and more than anything, I believe in the mission and can't wait to get digging in the dirt this spring! 👨‍🌾💪🌱

Today's podcast was meant to be a focus on the seeds that I'm planting for the CSA today, but as per usual, I went off on a tiny tangent at the beginning of the episode - but a much-needed one! In the rant I talk about my Morning Pages milestone - today was day 50 of starting my day off with writing 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. This practice has helped elaborate on half-baked thoughts or assumptions and actually tease out the truth. I think that so often in our lives we build up these false beliefs from our fears & judgements, but we don't question them. Morning Pages has helped me cut through the noise and has given me permission to be creative and to spend time on developing myself. After my rant, I talk about my big plans for the garden today - planting broccoli, lettuce, spinach, greens and other early-season veggies. We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel of winter and it begins with the seeds we plug today 💪🌱 Plug walk! 😂👨‍🌾

In today's episode I talk about my big weekend project - collecting all of the ideas I have written in various notebooks, notepads, notes apps, or scraps of paper and FINALLY gathering them into one conglomeration of content & ideas. From here I can pick and choose from a vast list of ideas or I can begin to build a framework and a blueprint for my content topics moving forward. What this means is that I am finally creating instead of just collecting ideas into lists - the most important thing to is act on your creative urges, be the change you want to see in the world, create the content that you can't find. This all distills down into providing content that adds value to people's lives through information, entertainment, and inspiration 🧘‍♂️🏋️‍♂️👨‍🌾💪🌱

In today's episode I talk about prioritizing your work and your day - and really the importance of doing things for YOU instead of doing things to seek approval. We live in a world with a whirlwind of demands placed on us by society and by our Self. Listen in to hear how I deal with that distinction between what goals I have set and what is expected of me - and some hacks to make everyone happy 🤓

In today's podcast I talk about cultivating your interests into passion - and my take on how things develop from hobbies into side gigs and obsessions. My current obsessions revolve around Mind, Body, and Garden and in this episode I talk about how I have taken them from an interest into something that I want to improve upon for the rest of my life 💪🌱

It's been 60 degrees in Ohio for the past couple days but today we're back to snow & ice - but that isn't killing my excitement for spring, it's just fueling it! In today's episode I talk about the mild winter we have been having and how it's tempting me to get leafy greens and cold hardy crops planted out early. It can be done with the help of low tunnels and frost blankets, but if you screw up, you could lose your whole crop 😭 Right now I'm thinking about getting lettuce, spinach, arugula, mizuna, and other Asian greens started in seed trays so that we can jumpstart the CropBoxes this year and maybe even get a few earlier-than-expected harvests 🥬 And BTW - this is the first call for all CropBoxers or people interested in receiving a subscription box of fresh veggies & herbs from the Garden of Gains 💪🌱 if you're in the Piqua area and looking for fresh, organically-grown produce - let me know, spots are limited!