Growing food

Want to grow food pesticide-free indoors or outdoors on the Canadian prairies and in northern Canada? We're here to help! The first section on this page sorts all of the advice, plant by plant. The second section gives you strategies on how to manage a garden, pesticide-free.

Food plants

From apples to zucchini, we have prepared information for growing all common fruits, herbs, vegetables and will be adding more uncommon produce and edible weeds too. Choose a tab below for each and follow the links for detailed growing, harvest, cooking and preservation advice.

Click on the tabs above to choose your plants.

There are many ways to be a successful gardener and everyone who gives advice has a bias. We evaluate many methods and choose what we consider to be best practices for our growers. This doesn't mean other ways won't work, it simply means we feel these are the best based on our criteria. We do update our recommendations periodically. For a detailed answer on how we decide our recommendations, see our article "Why have you chosen this advice".

Vegetables

Fruit

Coming soon!

Remember if you're growing edible flowers, make sure you don't use pesticides!

If there's a food plant that you want to grow indoors, check on the tabs to the left to find it. On each plant page we will list how to grow it indoors and recommended cultivars (or if it's not recommended). Below are special circumstances for growing vegetables indoors.

Microgreens

Sprouts

Indoor lettuce

Vegetable growing advice

The articles in the tabs above will help guide you through your gardening season.

These articles can help new gardeners too, but they may be too much information than you need just starting out. If you're a new gardener, we recommend you start with our New Gardeners section.

If you're in the far north, we have reocommended adjustmetns with each plant above. Also, we encourage you to visit our Gardening in the far north section too!

The biggest garden maintenance tasks are:

watering
weeding
watching for problems

All of these will be significantly reduced if you use mulch and a no till system. Soil health is critical for all of these. During the maintenance phase of gardening, we recommend you check out the pages below.

Harvest instructions are below. You'll also find specific instructions with each food plant. Once you have it all harvested, make sure you check our Preparing and preserving produce pages to learn how to store your produce long term.