Grow-It-Organically.com

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Grow-It-Organically.com

Expert advice and consulting services for all aspects of organic vegetable gardening and edible landscaping. www.grow-it-organically.com

Steve Masley is the founder of Grow-It-Organically.com, a web site devoted to helping organic gardeners and people who want to leave chemicals behind and grow food without toxins. He taught the Local Sustainable Agriculture Field Practicum at Stanford University in 2007 and 2008, and has been growing food organically and designing edible landscapes in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 years.

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10/25/2025

Calabrian peppers grown in a pot on our front porch. One of the most container-friendly peppers that consistently produces a stunning display every September. We make a delicious spicy red pepper sauce from them to spread on sandwiches or kick up the heat in soups or pasta sauces.

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04/17/2025

‘Albabionda’ is a gorgeous Batavian summer lettuce from that we’re growing for the first time this year. Crisper than a butterhead but not as crunchy as a romaine, its light green leaves offer a beautiful contrast to darker green or blushed varieties.
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12/14/2024

Last of the hot chiles, ready for harvest and hot sauce. The first one is ‘Hot Paper Lantern’, the second is ‘Jamaican Yellow Hot’. There are some Datils and Fatalis behind them. They’re hard to get photos of, but these are a start. We have a chile head nephew-in-law who loves hot sauces, so we’re going to make a scorcher for him.

11/21/2024

Tabasco peppers ripening (slowly) at HN Garden, Portola Valley, California. Night time temperatures are still in the high 30’s, so there’s still time, but the window is closing. Once it drops below 35 F, the plants will start dropping leaves, and it will be time to harvest and hang the plants in a warm place, so the fruit can continue to ripen. Then it’s time to ferment some Tabasco sauce. Our clients use the sauce to make notoriously good Buffalo Wings for the Super Bowl, and beyond.
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11/12/2024

Winter garden going in at LN Garden, Woodside, California. Brassicas catching the slanting late afternoon sun. This is the tail end of California’s “second season”—seedlings planted from the middle of summer till the middle of November can still develop enough leaf area to continue growing as the days get shorter and the light dimmer. Broccoli can still head up by Christmas or New Year’s. Seedlings planted a week or two from now won’t develop enough leaf area and will go semi-dormant until the days start lengthening in January.

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We always try to get at least one bed planted in every garden in this fall window, so our clients have vegetables for the holidays. We plant additional beds at monthly intervals to provide a continuous harvest through the winter.
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08/16/2024

‘Crokini’ cherry tomatoes in our back yard planter. It’s a new variety from that’s late blight resistant, prolific, and delicious. It also seems to be more crack resistant than other cherry tomato varieties, although the true test for crack resistance comes in fall, as the nights are cooling down. Our clients love them.
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06/12/2024

Harvested a monster cabbage from a 40-gallon fabric pot in the back yard. ‘Tropic Giant’ lived up to its name—this one weighed in at 11 3/4 lbs. after shredding, salting, and massaging, it all fit into our Gartopf sauerkraut crock.

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05/24/2024

‘The Impressionist’ rose glowing in our front yard. On an overcast day like today, it’s such a beautiful rose.
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06/04/2023

‘Olympia’ spinach certainly lives up to its name! This has been a stellar performer in all our gardens this year. Even when the leaves get huge like this, they remain melt-in-your-mouth tender. It takes a long time to bolt, and seems to be more resistant to spinach leaf miners than other varieties we’ve grown, but our cold spring could have something to do with both. We’ll be growing this variety every year going forward—but only for our spinach-loving clients—so we’ll see how it performs under warmer conditions.
You can get seeds from .
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12/02/2022

Vegepod spinach and lettuces kicking in a month after planting. It took us a while to get our resettled at our new place. Had to level the footprint and squeeze it into the upper garden, but it’s in a sunny, choice spot for year-round production.
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What we love about our Vegepod is the lush growth, and the speed of that growth—leafy greens just seem to explode out of it a few weeks after planting, especially in the transitional seasons of late fall and early spring. There’s something about the thermal properties that just accelerates growth. The elevated soil bed—deep enough for a healthy root system, but shallow enough to warm up quickly after the sun comes up—and the dome create a perfect microclimate. If we plant the Vegepod and a standard raised bed at the same time, we’ll be harvesting from the Vegepod 2 weeks before the raised bed. The dome also keeps birds, rodents, and insect pests out. Spinach leaf miners are a major pest for spinach, beets, and Swiss chard in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have to check for eggs every few days—or spray Spinosad weekly—or the leaves will be riddled with them. The dome keeps the egg-laying adults out.
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12/01/2022

Better late than never! We finally got our main garlic crop going for next year. We usually get our garlic planted by early October—we did for all of our clients this year—but we had to move again last summer, and every time we move, we have to rebuild our garden. The upper garden, where these beds are, is a dense web of tree roots from our neighbor’s Deodar Cedars, so we plant everything in pots up there, with a layer of plastic underneath, to prevent feeder roots from infiltrating the beds (we planted squash and chiles in 2 pots here in August, and they were already full of tree roots when we took them out to plant these—so yes, the plastic is necessary).
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The good thing is, we can let the garlic “run till it’s done” up here, which should be mid-late June here in Belmont. In Petaluma, it’s hotter in spring, and the garlic wrapped up in May. There, we would have had smaller bulbs getting the garlic in this late. Hopefully here we can get away with it. We’ll have winter squash seedlings ready to go in as soon as this garlic is ready to harvest next year.
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Belmont, CA
94002

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https://www.grow-it-organically.com/

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