🌱 The Beanstalk is a gardening podcast for everyday growers who want to grow more, learn more, and become a little more self-reliant—one season at a time.
Hosted by John, your neighborhood garden buddy, The Beanstalk takes a friendly, down-to-earth approach to growing your own food and understanding the plants that make our gardens such amazing places. Whether you're planting your very first seed, building a few raised beds in the backyard, experimenting with a greenhouse, or you've been gardening for decades, there's always something new to dig into.
Each episode explores a different corner of the gardening world. We take deep dives into individual vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs, flowers, native plants, and other crops, covering everything from planting and growing to harvesting, common pests and diseases, companion planting, seed saving, and the advantages and challenges that come with growing them. Along the way, you'll find practical gardening advice, interesting plant history, a little science, plenty of garden experimentation, and the occasional trip into the Garden Nerd Corner.
But The Beanstalk isn't just about individual plants. We also explore the bigger systems that make a garden work, including soil health, composting, irrigation and water conservation, seed starting, greenhouse growing, pollinators and beneficial insects, organic pest management, garden planning, seasonal maintenance, raised beds, preserving the harvest, and plenty more.
The garden itself is never perfect, either—and that's part of the point. We talk about successes, failures, experiments, strange weather, stubborn plants, lessons learned, and what happens when gardening plans meet reality. The goal isn't to create an immaculate showpiece. It's to build a productive garden, understand why things work, learn from what doesn't, and become a better gardener every season.
Based in Utah and gardening in USDA Zone 6, John brings the perspective of a suburban grower dealing with hot summers, cold winters, short transitional seasons, unpredictable weather, and the constant challenge of getting the most out of the space and growing season available. While that experience occasionally gives the show a Zone 6 and Intermountain West perspective, The Beanstalk is made for gardeners everywhere. The fundamentals of healthy soil, good watering, thoughtful planting, observation, experimentation, and working with nature travel pretty well.
Self-reliance is also at the heart of what we're growing. You don't need acres of farmland or a picture-perfect homestead to produce some of your own food. A backyard, greenhouse, raised bed, container, or even a small patch of usable ground can become surprisingly productive when you learn how to use it. Every tomato picked from the vine, every handful of berries, every saved seed, and every lesson carried into next season is another small step toward knowing how to provide a little more for yourself.
Most importantly, The Beanstalk is meant to feel like gardeners talking to gardeners. There's no expectation that you know everything before you begin, and there will always be another experiment worth trying. Ask questions, make mistakes, celebrate the harvests that go right, laugh at the ones that don't, and keep learning.
So grab your gloves, wander out to the garden, and join John and your fellow Beans as we explore what we can grow, what we can learn from it, and just how far a little patch of soil can take us.
From our patch to yours… keep on climbing. 🌱
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