Practical Vegetable Gardening

Get the most food for your effort

Who am I?

My name is Todd Schriver. Since 2010, I have been the owner of Rock Dove Farm, a 19 acre vegetable and fruit farm near West Jefferson, OH. We bring fresh vegetables to Farmer’s Markets in the greater Columbus area 49 weeks per year. Over the last few years, we have also been propagating starts for sale to home gardeners.

The state of home gardening

Every week people tell me about their home gardens and a lot of what I learn is alarming. Regular people with little experience are confronted with conflicting and misleading advice about how to garden, what to grow, how much to plant… it was bad enough when it was just a garden publishing industry that simply wasn’t fact checking their authors. Now there is youtube, tiktok, instagram, and other platforms where anyone can claim to be an expert and, if they have slick enough production, it can look like they know what they’re doing regardless of the value of their advice.

It’s no wonder home gardeners spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours just to be disappointed in the production they receive from their plants.

The Garden Mindset

I want to help you sift through the information out there to figure out what is good and what is bullshit.

Obviously, I am growing at a different scale than what you are, but the fundamental goals are similar. My garden is designed to produce a beautiful selection of 10-35 different vegetables per week so that I can sell them to make a living. Your garden is to feed your family an interesting and diverse diet during the season and maybe preserve some for the winter. I need my labor and inputs to be productive to pay the bills. You need your labor and inputs to be productive to save on groceries.

I am not here to tell you what to grow, but I am here to make sure you are getting the most for your effort.

Schedule

Most weeks I will post about my weekly vegetable production agenda on Sunday for the following week. I will also sporadically release content about varieties, tools, techniques, and products. Time and money allowing, I will also dive in on specific books and content creators or viral gardening videos.

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