To up my home-veggie game, I sat in with Kansas City Community Gardens

The good news about gardening in Kansas City: If you plant something during the summer, it’s probably going to grow.

I can attest to that. Over the last three years, my boyfriend and I have cultivated an expansive array of fruit-bearing plants in the front yard of our east Kansas City home. What started as a small patch by the porch now lines the fence and stretches to the street, ensuring that, by August, we’ll have squash vines scoring the lawn and pumpkins hanging from the trees.

There’s more to growing than just digging a hole and dropping in a seed. We’ve battled extreme heat, late frosts, drought, excessive rain, insects, deer, groundhogs, the neighborhood kids, plant diseases, and the inexplicable failure of our entire hot-pepper crop. Yet we’ve always had at least something to show for our efforts.

Last year, for instance, we harvested probably 100 pounds of cucumbers, some as big around as a baseball bat. The year before, we had enough luscious red, purple and yellow tomatoes to make salsa, pasta sauce and stew. We also had enough zucchini to give away, randomly depositing bags of the striped squash on our unsuspecting friends’ porches.

Despite the challenges, according to Sharon Goldstein, community-partner-gardens coordinator at Kansas City Community Gardens (KCCG), a lot of people overthink the process – especially in the Midwest.

“If you plant some tomatoes in the ground, you’ll grow some tomatoes, as long as they’re in the sun and you water them,” she says. “We live in the Midwest – stuff grows here.”

Open since 1979, KCCG manages eight community gardens across the metro and partners with more than 250. The nonprofit also works with more than 200 schools and has 40 youth gardens. In other words, these people know their stuff — and they aim to share that knowledge in a series of workshops that run three times a month through September, covering topics such as eliminating insects, planting and watering, and cooking with seasonal veggies.

To up my garden game, I attended a workshop earlier this month on vegetable-gardening basics, led by KCCG’s executive director, Ben Sharda. Some common problems addressed:

1. Your garden isn’t getting enough sun.
It seems like a few hours of direct sunlight should be enough to sustain a garden. After all, my pasty ass burns if I’m outside for more than 20 minutes. Turns out that’s not the case – most plants need a eight hours of sun a day to reach their full potential.

Here’s another point I didn’t consider: Taller plans should go at the back of the bed so they don’t block crucial rays, and the garden should be planted away from trees and bushes. One of our cabbage plants resides in the shade of a pear tree, and it is half the size of the ones that get full sun.

2. Your plants need more space.
According to Goldstein, crowding the bed is one of the biggest mistakes gardeners make. She does it, too — every year, she admits, she has to fight the impulse to cram more plants in. One way she remains mindful of spacing is by cutting up old venetian blinds to use as guides. For instance, she’ll cut a 24-inch segment to measure between tomatoes, or 16 inches for peppers.

“It’s human nature to look at the small tomato plant and forget that it grows to seven feet tall,” she says. “They need space. You’ll get more food from it when you use the proper spacing.”

3. Your tomatoes are pussies.
There’s nothing like a homegrown tomato. Thanks to my dad, I’ve been eating them since I was a kid, and I think all commercially grown tomatoes taste like someone sneezed in a red bag. But if your tomato plant were one of your drinking buddies, it would get tipsy after its first margarita and start crying about a year-old breakup. Tomatoes, you see, are notoriously susceptible — to disease, though, rather than to bad relationships.

That’s why Sharda recommends moving the crop to a different area of the garden each year and not mixing sick plants into your compost. He also points out that tomato plants should be watered at the base, avoiding the leaves; this helps prevent disease. Oh, and once those suckers are grown, don’t store them in the refrigerator, unless you like them flavorless and mushy.

4. Growing the food is the easy part.
Let’s say you raise enough veggies to create a serious bounty, ready to bust open a cornucopia on Instagram. Sure, it looks great – but what comes next? How do you actually, you know, make this crap taste good?

Goldstein shares ideas in her monthly cooking workshops at KCCG. “Roasted cabbage with parsley-Dijon vinaigrette is one of people’s surprise favorites,” she says. “Shaved-zucchini salad with olive oil and fresh basil is always a sleeper surprise. I have a whole garden of herbs at my disposal. I’m picking things and cooking with them within a couple of hours.”

5. Organic matter is essential for good soil.
Once you’ve shut your garden down in the fall, it’s already time to start planning for next year. This is when you’ll add organic material: grass clippings, leaves, coffee grounds, compost, manure. I was delighted to learn it’s totally fine to walk outside and hurl pizza crusts and apple cores directly into the garden all winter. It’s like getting a return investment on your trash.

Fall is a long way off, though – in fact, it’s not quite too late to plant a few things and get growing.

See the full schedule of workshops at kccg.org/workshops.