Gardening - Vegetables to eat.
Flowers to appreciate.

Begonia red on Chocolate 23
Come and share my gardening experiences. I’m Ken Brown and I’ve been “Dallying In The Dirt” most of my life and like most back yard farmers I love to share my growing tips and my experiences. Visit this space often, the tips will change and accumulate, showing you what I'm doing now. I'll tell you what I'm doing as I, find some new and remember some old, tricks in my quest to squeeze all of my horticultural fantasies into a confined urban space.


17 February 2024 It's that time of year when little packages start arriving at my door containing those exciting packets of seeds that will make this year's garden another in a long series of delights. The germination bed is heating up so that the heat loving seeds will more easily germinate. The lights are on ready to provide that intense light that the seedlings need. My fluorescent fixtures are slowly being replaced with LED's. All the containers have been washed and sterilized. We are ready to bring new life to our garden. Annual flowers are making a big resurgence partly because of the significant increase in species and varieties giving a wonderful diversity of colours, textures, shapes and sizes. We are now doing most of our speaking engagements in person and I have developed a great one featuring all of those annual flowers that we can grow from seed follow this link for details about my presentations.

What’s New or Seasonal!

Can you actually save money growing your own vegetables or is it just a great pastime?

One of the best treats in your vegetable garden is a fresh vine ripened Tomato.

Seed Catalogue are a wonderful source of growing information. The seed companies want you to succeed and become life long customers.

Knowing when to start your seeds and when to move them outside is critical knowledge if you are going to be a successful seed starter

How To Get Help! With some reading here and a little luck, maybe you can avoid most of the mistakes that I have made on your behalf and be more successful. When you inevitably make your own mistakes, ask me about them and I’ll try to provide some answers or tips through my free ezine.


Want your information quickly; you can search my entire site or else just enjoy reading on and following all the links.


My horticultural haven is unfinished and imperfect. If it was otherwise then my life’s work would be done and I wouldn’t know what to do. Come along with me as I work toward perfection, we’ll be together for a long time. I currently grow a rather crazy mix of vegetables a variety of perennial flowers and a smattering of annual flowers in the gaps and in a variety of containers. Oh! The vegetables are often found growing in containers as well.


Where’s my garden? All of these things compete for space in a modestly large city lot in a small town east of Toronto ON that hovers between Canadian zone 5&6. I continue to develop new techniques for producing as many vegetables as possible in a rather confined space, a technique that I refer to as Vertical Vegetables. This allows myself and the “Assistant Gardener” (aka. my long suffering spouse,) to eat our own fresh vegetables for about 7-8 months of the year.








Let’s eat! To really enjoy all of these vegetables you need to prepare them in delicious and interesting recipes. I also love to cook and experiment and you will find the things that wind up tasting delicious on my recipes pages.







Trials and tribulations! I like to try new things and report back to my readers what works and what might not be the best value in town. I have recently tested a variety of trowels and last summer applied a variety of mulches to my many beds. Some looked better, some cost more some did neither but may have been effective mulches. Frequent readers can keep up to date on products and plants that I’m trying. I visit other gardens as often as possible and report back to my readers just what they might find interesting there.




Come and spend time with me in my garden. I find it the most delightful, sometimes frustrating, usually therapeutic, pastime and the physical effort exerted produces much better results than any treadmill. I have been trying to convince mother nature to do her landscape my way, for many years and her responses are usually very humbling, occasionally encouraging, frequently amusing but always quite gratifying. We continue to discuss, (argue about,) our separate definitions of a weed. These successes and failures also make up the content of my seminars.




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Regular Tips and Smiles from Ken’s Gardening Activities

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