Who we serve
Beginner home and community food growers working in containers, raised beds, backyard plots, community gardens, and other small growing spaces.
Beginner Gardening Foundations • Live online
Practical gardening education for home and community food growers
Grow something
that lasts.
Learn how to build healthy soil, make confident growing decisions, and create knowledge your family can carry forward.
Featured workshopPlan My First Garden
Beginner Gardening Foundations
Beginner Gardening Foundations
Date & timeNext date coming soon
IncludesMy First Garden Plan • Plan sheet • 30-day replay
InvestmentRegistration currently closed
Featured workshopBeginner-friendly • Live online
Plan My First Garden — Beginner Gardening Foundations
Stop guessing.
Start growing.
Learn what plants need and how crop choice, season, growing space, soil, water, and care work together. We’ll use a guided garden example to help you make informed decisions and build a starting plan for your own garden. Includes My First Garden Plan, the beginner’s guide, a garden plan sheet, live questions, and 30-day replay access.
- Next date
- Coming soon
- Registration
- Currently closed
- Length
- Announced with the next date
- Investment
- $35
- Replay
- 30 days
- Format
- Live online
Our October 10 workshop has finished. Sign up for future class announcements and gardening information. Signing up does not reserve a class seat.
What you’ll learn
- Learn what plants need: light, water, air, nutrients, and room for roots
- Choose crops that fit your growing space, season, and goals
- Use local Extension resources to check planting windows
- Compare containers, raised beds, and in-ground growing
- Compare conventional, organic, regenerative soil-building, and no-till practices—and choose compatible practices for your garden
- Make sense of soil, growing mixes, drainage, pH, and soil-test recommendations
- Read seed packets and transplant directions for planting and spacing
- Check watering needs and respond to common plant problems
- Understand basic pest-management and harvesting decisions
- Use Observe → Understand → Decide → Apply → Reassess to build a realistic starting plan, without buying a bunch of unnecessary stuff
Keep learning with the guide
My First Garden Plan
A beginner’s guide to growing food by Yashica. Follow Kijani’s first garden, use the five-step decision process, and make a plan for your own space.
Explore the book & free Plan Sheet →
For organizations and community groups
Help your community
start growing.
Host a beginner gardening workshop for your library, church, community garden, neighborhood group, or organization.
Host a Workshop →Our educational identity
Read the garden.
Not just the instructions.
Grow Generational Roots helps people connect gardening information to the conditions in their own growing spaces so they can make increasingly informed decisions instead of relying only on one-size-fits-all instructions.
What we teach
How soil, plants, water, drainage, sunlight, nutrients, pests, seasons, and growing practices work together to influence practical food production.
How we teach
Clear, practical, research-informed education that explains what a recommendation assumes, why it may work, and when it may need to change.
Grow Generational Roots Decision Process™
Observe. Understand.
Decide. Apply. Reassess.
Gardens are living systems, and growing conditions vary. The Grow Generational Roots Decision Process™ helps growers reason through what is happening, choose an action that fits, and learn from what happens next.
- 01
Observe
Begin with what is actually happening. Notice the plant, soil, weather, light, growing stage, recent changes, pests, and management practices.
- 02
Understand
Consider how those conditions may interact, identify reasonable possibilities, and determine what additional information may be needed.
- 03
Decide
Use credible information together with the conditions in your garden to select an appropriate course of action.
- 04
Apply
Put the decision into practice in a way that fits the crop, environment, season, and growing system.
- 05
Reassess
Observe the response, decide whether the expected change occurred, and adjust when necessary.
Our educational standard
We aim to be accurate, transparent, research-informed, practical, and appropriately cautious. We distinguish credible guidance from personal observation, explain meaningful conditions and uncertainty, and revise our materials when stronger information becomes available.
The format may change. The reasoning process should not.From soil to harvest
Learn the why.
Then grow your way.
Good gardening is not memorizing a list of rules. It is learning how to read your space, work with living soil, and make informed decisions when conditions change.
- 01
Read your space
Sunlight, growing area, containers, beds, and the limits that shape a realistic plan.
- 02
Build living soil
Understand texture, organic matter, fertility, and what your plants need from the ground up.
- 03
Choose with purpose
Select crops for your season, family, space, and experience instead of following trends.
- 04
Grow the knowledge
Turn each season into practical wisdom you can use again—and pass on.
A garden feeds more than a table. It builds confidence, connects generations, and teaches us how to care for what comes next.
Workshop questions
Know before
you grow.
Here is what to expect from Plan My First Garden — Beginner Gardening Foundations.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is for beginner home and community food growers planning a garden in containers, raised beds, backyard plots, community gardens, or another small growing space.
Do I need gardening experience?
No. The workshop is designed to help a first-time grower make a realistic plan based on their goals, available space, sunlight, soil, and growing season.
What supplies should I bring?
No specialized supplies are required. Bring something to write with and any useful notes, measurements, or photos of the space where you hope to grow. My First Garden Plan, the beginner’s guide, and a garden plan sheet are included.
When and how will the workshop meet?
The next live online workshop date has not been announced. Sign up for updates to receive future class information. Joining the updates list does not reserve a seat.
Will a replay be available?
Yes. Registered participants receive replay access for 30 calendar days after it is delivered.
When does registration close?
Registration for the October 10 workshop is closed. Future registration dates will be announced with the next workshop.
What will I leave with?
You will build a starting garden plan shaped around what you want to grow and the conditions you actually have, with any decisions that need local verification identified.
What is the cancellation and refund policy?
To request a refund to the original payment method or a one-time transfer of your registration to a future session, contact Grow Generational Roots at least 48 hours before the scheduled start. Requests made fewer than 48 hours before class and no-shows are nonrefundable because replay access is included.
What if Grow Generational Roots cancels or reschedules?
If Grow Generational Roots cancels or reschedules the workshop, registered participants may choose a refund, a one-time transfer of their registration to a future session, or attendance at the rescheduled session.
Meet the founder
Built in the garden.
Shared with community.
I’m Yashica, founder of Grow Generational Roots — an Army veteran, home food grower, and self-directed student of soil health.
My work began in my own garden, where learning to grow food eventually led me beneath the plants and into the relationships among soil structure, organic matter, biology, water, nutrients, roots, pH, and the practices we use to manage them.
That curiosity changed the way I garden.
Instead of simply asking, “What should I add?” or “What should I do?”, I became more interested in understanding what I was seeing, what might be causing it, and what information I needed before acting.
Today, I’m continuing that learning while developing my own living-soil system at home — observing, researching, applying what I learn, and adjusting as the system develops.
I created Grow Generational Roots to make that kind of thinking more accessible to everyday growers.
My teaching combines research-informed education, hands-on growing, careful observation, and practical examples. I don’t just want to tell you what someone recommends. I want to help you understand why a recommendation may work, what conditions it depends on, and how to decide whether it makes sense for your garden.
I continue to study on my own and hope to earn a degree in soil and crop sciences.
I also believe knowing the edges of what you know matters.
Some questions can be worked through with good observation and credible information. Others call for a soil or plant test, university Extension support, or specialized professional expertise. Learning to recognize the difference is part of becoming a stronger grower.
I don’t believe growers need to know everything.
I believe they deserve the tools to ask better questions, understand what they’re seeing, and make increasingly informed decisions for themselves.
Your garden can start here
Let's grow something
together.
Bring your questions, your space, and what you hope to grow. We will build the plan together.
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