Hi. I’m Tom Bartels and I’m an organic gardener living in Durango Colorado.

I guess I’m not just a gardener. I’ve really taken it into my life to the point that I could be considered an obsessive gardener. Or more politely, I have a deep interest in optimizing the skills required for domestic horticulture. I love to grow food, and I’ve found some pretty creative ways to grow it organically without having to throw every minute of my summer at it. And I enjoy sharing the infection with other backyard food gardeners.

I’ve been using a mixture of bio-intensive methods since 2001 in my home garden in the high desert climate of Southwest Colorado. We’re at 6500 feet elevation with about a 120 day frost free growing season on a lucky year. My garden is about 1200 square feet. I use compost bins, worm bins, laying hens and several time-saving methods that add efficiency to the whole system.

I utilize the information I’ve learned over the years from various classes and seminars, as well as intensive trainings with John Jeavons and distilled the principles to make a workable outline for growing astounding amounts of food in a small home garden. Most of the real important stuff just came from field experience, and lots of mistakes.

I also designed and built a 4000 square foot market garden downtown as a demonstration of local food production. I created a mid-week garden-market right over the garden fence that proved how local food production can emerge from a lawn space very effectively using these techniques. The same methods I used in this market garden can be scaled down for use in the home garden to help reduce your work load while ensuring consistent yields.

This outline can be applied in a modular fashion on any size garden so that each year, the garden produces more, while using less of the gardener’s time.

I invite you to view some of the free video content on the site to help motivate your gardening efforts. The link is somewhere on this page. If you’re interested in learning more about how to Grow Food Well, please enter your e-mail and I’ll contact you when the next garden coaching video series launches.

Now go out there and Grow Some Food!

Cheers

Tom