Food Garden Life Show: Helping You Harvest More from Your Edible Garden, Vegetable Garden, and Edible Landscaping

Steven Biggs: Horticulturist and edible landscaping expert.

Want to grow your own food but need creative ideas so you can get the most from your space and your growing zone? Our passion is the edible garden.

We help people grow food on balconies, in backyards, and beyond—whether it’s edible landscaping, a vegetable garden, container gardens, or a home orchard.

There are many ways to approach edible landscaping. Find out how to harvest enough fruit, vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. Get top tips for exotic crops. And learn how to garden in a way that suits any situation.

Host Steven Biggs was recognized by Garden Making magazine as one of the “green gang” making a difference in Canadian horticulture. His home-garden experiments span driveway straw-bale gardens, a rooftop kitchen garden, fruit plantings, and an edible-themed front yard. He's a horticulturist, award-winning broadcaster and author, and former horticulture instructor with George Brown and Durham Colleges in Ontario, Canada.

Get started with one of our fan favourites. Season 6, Episode 10: Big Harvests from a Small Space with a Vertical Vegetable Garden.

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268 episodes
Updated Thursday

Episodes268

Newest first

Sep 9, 2021 · 30 min
How to Use Fig Leaves in the Kitchen
Coconut. Almond. Green fig.These are some of the flavours people use to describe what they taste when Chef David Salt serves something flavoured with fig leaves.Salt cooked with fig leaves in London, England, where he had a ready source of fig leaves in a
Sep 2, 2021 · 1 hr 1 min
How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying
Mushroom identification can be daunting for beginners, with Latin names and spore prints used to differentiate hard-to-identify mushrooms. In his new book, How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying: An Absolute Beginners Guide to Identifying 29 Wild Edib
Aug 26, 2021 · 40 min
Are You Frightened of Landrace Gardening?
Joseph Lofthouse had hundreds of jars of seed around his house when he began market gardening. He saved seeds from each variety…a time-consuming task. Today he has far fewer jars of seed. Today he practices landrace gardening. Lofthouse no longer focus
Aug 19, 2021 · 42 min
Helping Other People Eat through Gardening
Julie Brunson didn’t garden as a child, but began to garden and grow food as an adult. When her husband was in a dark place and found solace in their garden, the garden not only fed them, it helped him to heal. That was the start of a journey into teachi
Aug 12, 2021 · 22 min
Container Gardening with Hot Peppers – REWIND
What is the ideal plant for a small yard? The ideal plant for someone wanting something ornamental – yet edible too? And, just to complicate things, it has to be...
Aug 5, 2021 · 1 hr
What's to Hate? A Look at the Whole Okra
Chris Smith remembers his first okra encounter well. It was at a diner in Georgia. A native of the UK, where growing conditions are not conducive to heat-loving okra, the vegetable was foreign to him. So was the cuisine of the American south. His recoll
Jul 29, 2021 · 44 min
Edible Front Yards and Sensory Gardens
Jennifer Lauruol weaves together permaculture concepts, native plants, food plants, forest gardening, and educational elements in her regenerative-garden design work in Lancaster, England. Her passion is edible ornamental gardening—especially in front ya
Jul 22, 2021 · 47 min
Meet the Indiana Jones of Pawpaw
Meet Neal Peterson, the Indiana Jones of pawpaws. He was so moved by the taste of pawpaw that it became his life’s work. There were improved pawpaw varieties in the early 20th century—but the fruit fell into obscurity. Peterson dug through the literatur
Jul 15, 2021 · 38 min
Urban Farm Camp for City Kids
Today on the podcast we head to Reno, Nevada to hear about Urban Roots, an organization that uses garden education to help change the way people eat. It takes gardens to classrooms…and uses the garden as a classroom at its urban teaching farm. Fayth Ross
Jul 8, 2021 · 1 hr 2 min
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Approach to No Till
In this rebroadcast of the radio show that aired live on July 7th, we talk about soil and no-till practices with market gardener, farm journalist, and podcaster Jesse Frost. He’s the host of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast (https://www.notillgrowers.co
Jul 1, 2021 · 51 min
Coppices, Alcoholic Hedges, and Thoughts on Ecological Gardening
Where is the sweet spot that gardening meets the natural world…so that gardening is ecological? Our guest today explains that ecological gardening is all about balance. Matt Rees-Warren says, “Your garden is a pocket of wild; it will never be purely wild
Jun 24, 2021 · 1 hr 1 min
Sochan, Galinsoga, Squash Tips: Root-to-Flower Cuisine
Our guest today, Chef Alan Bergo, looks at vegetables through the eyes of a forager. He’s passionate about using parts of the plant that are often overlooked. Chefs using a whole animals might use the term nose-to-tail cooking. Bergo takes this approach
Jun 17, 2021 · 32 min
Garden in Your 90s
“I can’t hold them back sometimes,” says physiotherapist Nancy Durrant as she tells us about the garden at the long-term care home where she works. The residents she’s talking about are mainly in their 90s. And the vegetables and herbs they grow and harv
Jun 10, 2021 · 37 min
Black Creek Community Farm
Today on the podcast we visit the Black Creek Community Farm (https://www.blackcreekfarm.ca) in Toronto. The farm is located along the northern boundary of the City of Toronto, in a densely populated neighbourhood where Toronto meets one of its northern
Jun 3, 2021 · 1 hr 1 min
Grow Fruit in a Small Garden
In a broadcast that originally aired live on The Food Garden Life Radio Show, we head to California to talk with Christy Wilhelmi, a self-described garden nerd with a passion for growing fruit and vegetables, and an expert at small-space edible-garden des
May 27, 2021 · 26 min
City Farm School
Today on the podcast we head to Montreal to hear about City Farm School (http://www.cityfarmschool.com/), an urban-agriculture apprenticeship program. Jackie Martin, a co-ordinator with City Farm School (http://www.cityfarmschool.com/), explains that thi
May 20, 2021 · 30 min
Foodscaping
Today on the podcast we talk about “foodscaping,” gardening that combines the ornamental with the edible, also known as edible landscaping. Foodscaper Jeremy Cooper says he likes to work with plants that have multiple functions, including ornamental, her
May 13, 2021 · 37 min
Gardening and PTSD
Today on the podcast we explore the idea of healing through growing. We travel to Israel, to meet Nachum Lamour-Fridman. He uses plants and growing as part of the programming at the Borgani community centre he founded for PTSD sufferers and their familie
May 6, 2021 · 1 hr 1 min
Backyard Honeybees
In a broadcast that originally aired live on The Food Garden Life Radio Show, we head to North Carolina to chat with beekeeper Justin Maness. Backyard Hon...
Apr 29, 2021 · 38 min
It Takes One Person
Today on the podcast we meet an avid gardener who grew up in downtown Toronto, in a family that didn’t garden. And for a long time she didn’t garden either. But then one person sparked her interest in gardening, and dropped by with a bucket of llama poo