The Seeds

Shell Peas
Welcome to PoCo Gardens and to the first of many blog posts to come.  What follows is a short history of how we grew to be what we are, avid growers.

My wife Cari and I began with a simple idea: we wanted to eat only the best food and in doing so improve our health and expand our happiness.  This meant eating the freshest vegetables grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or other harmful agents which could compromise our health.  We wanted the tastiest, most nutritious and enriching vegetables we could cultivate.  Like many, we have, over the years, grown distrustful of the giant food corporations and disenfranchised with an increasingly broken healthcare system, and thus committed to taking control of our food production and by extension our health.

The best way to do that, we surmised, was to grow our own food using our small city yard which, like most, was a plot of grass.  Cari had only casually and occasionally grown herbs and flowers, and I had never grown anything in my life, being born and raised in an urban environment, so we were going to need to do some experimentation and gain some experience.  At first, we simply dug some holes through the grass and into the dirt and planted two or three tomato plants. Amazed at how well our tomatoes grew and produced and delighted by the quality and quantity of our early harvests, we began our quest to maximize the small space we had to grow everything we wanted to eat in the healthiest and best way possible.



In this blog, we will discuss all that we have learned and are still learning, explore and explain all the processes from organic composting to harvest and storage and preserving.  And, of course, eating.


In order to grow great vegetables without commercial fertilizers or chemicals, we found it necessary to continually feed the soil with compost using methods we will discuss and explore in future posts.  It is free and only requires a dedication to the task and a bit of vigilance.  Save all your organic matter such as leaves, twigs, grass clippings, plant-based food scraps, everything really.

Two-Compartment Compost Station















Over a few short years, we have transformed our yard from a uniform patch of grass to a food production miracle and every season we find new ways to maximize our space and produce more than the year before.  It is and has been an exciting, joyous, and hope-inducing endeavor that we look forward to continuing and sharing.  

This year's first carrot harvest


Ed Peterson
Cari Potter
On our continuing journey, we are learning the healing effects of home-grown foods as well as the psychological effects of abandoning the scarcity mindset in favor of one of abundance, which we hope to continue with all of you as collaborators.

Your friends from the future, Ed and Cari.










We're suburban homesteaders in Chicago southwest suburbs. Our passion is growing as much of our own food as possible. We have our own brand of canned pizza sauce with tomatoes straight from our own organic garden.

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