8-Step circle of awesome
Gardening is a lifestyle.
The Circle of Awesome integrates gardening into your life a little bit at a time. It’s all about what you can do right now to feel healthy and vital.
Your garden lifestyle isn’t always about being outside with your hands in the dirt. Gardening is also writing down your plan. It’s getting your resources ready. It’s learning the mindsets, strategies, and skills you need to successfully grow food.
Once a week, set aside time for your gardening adventure–not just the outdoor, hands-in-the-dirt kind of gardening, but the discovery process. Choose one of these eight topics to focus on:
🌎 Climate: Understand your climate and map out your garden site
🔮 Soil & Fertility : Build healthy soil and regenerate it year after year
💩 Compost: Why it’s crucial and how to find a style that works for you
🌱 Plants: Choosing crops, life cycles, seeds & transplants, and planting your site
💦 Water: Creating strategies for watering, storing water, and automating your system
🍅 Prune & Trellis: Care for your plants all season long (and avoid pests!)
🍏 Harvest: Harvest strategically for peak freshness, flavor, and storage
🧠 Mindset: Your garden can change your life if you let it!
You can start anywhere on the circle. Pick a topic to dive into this week, like one project or learning objective. You might choose to set up your compost system, plan your planting dates, learn about specific varieties of lettuces, or research a fertility plan.
Where on the Circle of Awesome do you want to spend a little time this week? What’s one thing you could do this week to move you toward the garden that you want?
There’s always something quick and easy you could do right now to make your garden more enjoyable, no matter what time of year it is and no matter what climate you’re in.
And next week, just go around the circle and pick your next topic to tackle!
This cycle is so powerful because small, weekly steps build your path to an abundant garden that nourishes your mind, body, and spirit. You break down all of the garden overwhelm and do a little bit at a time all throughout the year–instead of trying to cram it all in during your busy peak growing season.
You may notice pests, diseases, and weeds are not on the list. When you focus on health and prevention, you focus on more of what you want. That’s why mindset is so important (and that is on the list).
Our Mission
Regardless of how big your garden is…or even if you don’t have a garden yet and need tips for starting one, we want YOU to experience garden success.
It’s our mission to help support one million new growers create successful vegetable and herb gardens. And it’s our team’s passion to remove any obstacles that stand in your way so that you have the opportunity to wake up, step into your garden, and harvest organic breakfast greens or mint for your morning tea.
We want you to relish in the knowing that you have created a lifetime of healthy habits for you and your loved ones with garden-fresh food.
Our Team
Denise Beins
Chief of Operations
Denise Beins
Denise grew up on a small farm and one of her favorite childhood memories was to go to her grandparents and explore her grandpa’s large garden, cellar and greenhouse and enjoy the preserves and fresh coleslaw that her grandma made. You could say gardening is in her genes with her dad having a green thumb as well; although Denise was a ‘late bloomer’ with her gardening interest flourishing a few years ago after her adult son took an interest and converted their entire back yard to an edible garden experience. She continues to learn and try new things in the garden and is often in awe of how a seed evolves into a gorgeous vegetable to be enjoyed with their next meal.
Denise has run several online businesses for about a decade, consulted many online business entrepreneurs and is a serial entrepreneur who loves to find ways to streamline and optimize processes to help businesses work smarter and ultimately creating a great experience for their community.
Crystal Meserole
Garden Support & Instructor
Crystal Meserole
“After several years of gardening fails, I began to think that maybe being a grower just wasn’t right for me. Then I found Grow Your Own Vegetables and my failures transformed into a successful small farm operation within months. So when the opportunity arrived to work for Grow Your Own Vegetables and train to help others transform their failures into opportunities for success and abundance, it was an emphatic YES!
Crystal hopes to stand as a clear message to anyone who thinks they can’t grow: You can. Anyone can. With the right system, mindsets, and mentor, everything becomes possible.
Lauren Groves
Online Operations Manager
Lauren Groves
Stacey Murphy
Master Garden Instructor
Stacey Murphy
Stacey draws inspiration from the patterns of nature. Her mission is to inspire human consciousness toward resonance of joy, awe and wonder for the next evolution of the human spirit.
A master of innovative transition, Stacey is always thinking one step ahead of where industries are going: from managing billion dollar construction projects in NYC to writing children’s books that help kids love vegetables (My Dinosaur Ate My Broccoli). Her background as a visionary architect has led to breakthrough projects like BK Farmyards, a network of urban farmers transforming the local food system.
Stacey is a two time finalist for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for social entrepreneurship. She is currently exploring new, futuristic business opportunities and ways to move gardening education into the new world.
Brandon Beins
Culinary Educator
Brandon Beins
"This apprenticeship was really where I learned to care for ingredients; how to prepare them in a way that shows them respect. In order to really take care of your ingredients you need to start with the soil. I haven’t had many memorable meals that were prepared with unhealthy produce from depleted soils, and most of the memorable meals from my life were simple meals made from ingredients that had themselves been nourished lovingly and prepared the same way. I believe high quality food can be prepared by anyone, and it starts with the soil.”
Amy Davis
Wordsmith & Client Support
Amy Davis
In an age of increasing specialization, Amy proudly calls herself a generalist. She holds a Master’s degree in English, a RYT 200 yoga teacher certification, and is working her way through a bachelor’s in Biology. She believes in nurturing and following curiosity, then taking what you’ve learned and sharing it to better the lives of others.
Amy is an avid chaos gardener and has worked in agriculture for several years. In 2017, she first apprenticed on a Certified Organic vegetable farm and later took over as operations manager there. She also served as greenhouse manager for a local restaurant’s urban farm, and she spent a year in AmeriCorps service to an agriculture nonprofit specializing in education for beginning farmers and gardeners. She has a passion for greenhouse work, and she loves watching tiny little seedlings grow and turn into lunch. Amy and her husband grow an ever-evolving front yard garden in southern Appalachia (apple-atcha).