Garden to Table
Grow Something Useful
Garden to Table
This is where the gardening side of A Bit More Homemade lives: beginner raised-bed guidance, real first-season lessons, crop-specific growing guides, seasonal planting, and practical ways to use what comes out of the garden.
Start Here
New to Raised-Bed Gardening?
Begin with the complete guide, then use this page to move into the crops, seasons, and projects that are most useful to your own garden.
Raised Bed Gardening for Beginners: A Complete Guide
Plan useful crops, choose a location, build and fill beds, understand seasonal planting, use succession and vertical growing, manage pests, harvest what you grow, and learn from the first season.
From Our Garden
See What This Looks Like in a Real Backyard
These posts follow the ABMH garden as it changes through an actual Michigan growing season rather than presenting a perfect garden on paper.
Our Backyard Garden
Follow an ordinary suburban backyard from grass to raised beds, planting, growth, harvest, mistakes, and the lessons that came with it.
Follow the Garden →Our Backyard Garden in August
See how a finished zucchini bed became a second planting and learn what succession planting can still look like in a Michigan August.
See the August Garden →Grow a Crop
Focused Growing Guides
Use the cornerstone for the big picture and these guides when you need crop-specific spacing, timing, care, pest, and harvest help.
Growing Zucchini
Plan realistic spacing, manage a large mature plant, harvest often, and use the crop before it becomes overwhelming.
Grow Zucchini →How to Grow Cabbage in a Raised Bed
Learn spacing, moisture, fertility, insect exclusion, heading, harvest timing, and the raised-bed realities of growing cabbage.
Grow Cabbage →Use the Same Bed Again
Seasonal & Succession Planting
A raised bed does not have to become empty as soon as one summer crop finishes. Learn to look at the garden as changing space rather than a one-crop-per-year plan.
What to Plant in August in Michigan
Work backward from frost, reset genuinely finished spaces, keep August seedbeds moist, and choose cool-season crops that still have time to establish.
Grow, Then Cook
Use What Comes Out of the Garden
Growing food becomes much more useful when the garden connects directly to meals, preserving projects, and things your household already eats.
Fresh Homemade Salsa
A simple way to use ripe tomatoes, peppers, onions, and herbs now.
Make Fresh Salsa →Garden Salsa for Canning
A safety-reviewed shelf-stable option for a tomato-and-pepper harvest.
Make Canning Salsa →Homemade Spaghetti Sauce
Turn garden tomatoes and herbs into a familiar from-scratch meal.
Make Spaghetti Sauce →Homemade Zucchini Bread
Put an abundant garden crop to use in a dependable homemade loaf.
Bake Zucchini Bread →Refrigerator Dill Pickles
Turn a small cucumber harvest into a refrigerated preserving project.
Make Refrigerator Pickles →Small-Batch Sauerkraut
Use homegrown cabbage for a research-based fermentation project.
Make Sauerkraut →Garden Library
Guides We Are Building Next
These are future directions for the ABMH gardening library. They stay here as reader orientation rather than being duplicated inside the raised-bed cornerstone.
Seed Saving for Ordinary Backyard Gardeners
What is worth saving, when seeds are mature, labeling, storage, and where isolation matters.
Garden Journal + Printable
Track planting dates, varieties, harvests, problems, succession crops, and what to change next season.
Companion Planting for Beginners
Learn how to pair plants by height, timing, root space, airflow, pollinator value, and practical garden use without relying on rigid “good neighbor / bad neighbor” charts.
Backyard Herb Garden
Annual and perennial kitchen herbs, container mint, harvesting, drying, freezing, and everyday use.
Mulching & Small-Scale Composting
Practical ways to protect raised-bed soil and reuse ordinary garden and yard materials responsibly.
Growing Strawberries
Planting, runners, harvest, winter care, and practical squirrel protection.
Covered Raised Bed / Season Extension
Build a simple covered bed for lettuce and other cool-season crops later into the year.
From Garden to Kitchen
Growing It Is Only the First Part
Use the Preserving hub when the harvest is larger than tonight's meal, or browse recipes when you want to turn what is ripe today into something useful at the table.
Comments
Post a Comment