About Old Guy Gardener

"I want you to feel the joy of growing your best best garden ever!

That's why I do this"

A little about me

I’ve been growing vegetables and herbs west of the Cascades for just over 30 years.  Before that – I grew up helping my dad garden in several different parts of the country.

My Garden

I live on 5 acres surrounded by trees about 12 miles north of Vancouver, WA.  I have two fenced garden areas that I’ve cleverly named the north and south gardens.  There is a total of 14 – 4’ x 12’ beds.  Just under 700 ft.²

Some days that seems like not nearly enough and other days, way too much! I think it depends on whether I’m in the planning/dreaming stage or in an actual hard work stage. 

My soil is a gardener’s dream - nightmare that is - heavy clay, poor drainage and tons of rocks!  

Preparing a new bed from scratch is a major undertaking. It involves a heavy-duty tiller, a pickax, a broad fork digging tool, a standard digging fork, a rake, and occasionally a heavy steel digging/pry bar.  I’ll typically dig out, pickup and haul off about 200 pounds of rocks from that one 50 ft.² bed.

Gardening west of the Cascades is Different!

Here’s the deal, gardening west of the Cascades is different than anywhere else in the country. Our soil, our climate, our growing seasons, The plant varieties that work best and even some of our pests are different. 

There are tons of books, videos, blogs and articles in magazines about gardening, and many of them are very good. The problem is that very few of them account for the unique issues that we deal with in the maritime Northwest - west of the Cascades.

What you can expect here

My vision for this website is to create a learning center about how to account for our unique environment and how to make your Westside garden the best it can be.  I’ll do that with articles, videos, and online courses.  Part of the plan is also to create an online community of gardeners who can share their knowledge and questions with other members.

How can I help You?

I want to make this website valuable to you.  To do that – I need to know what you want.  I’ll provide a number of ways for you to give input – and I’ll pay attention to what you ask for.  The main way to contribute is to comment after you read a blog post or watch a video.  Tell me what you think, what I left out, what you were confused by, what you want to know more about – That kind of thing.  Please let me know what you want!

Also – I’d love it if you’d email me and tell me about your garden – any particular problems you have and what you’d like to see on the website.  You can find a couple of ways to contact me on my Contact Page here.