Welcome…

With so much fresh produce easily available in stores at this time in history, why bother to grow your own organic food? Its really about connection… connection to your joy, connection to your health, connection to your planet, connection to friends and family. Basically growing food is…

• Fun -“Nature bathing” is a real thing. It reduces stress and anxiety and builds the immune system.
• Rewarding - In addition to free exercise and accomplishment, fresh organic produce is expensive.
• Healthy - Besides exercise, studies show gardeners are 36% less like to suffer from dementia… ever!
• Sustainable and Environmentally Savvy - If every citizen ate 1 meal a day (any meal) of local, organic produce it would save more than 1,000,000 gallons oil a week.

GrowKeyWest.org is meant to be an educational resource for local gardeners and those who want to be. We hope to create a pared down, simple website that seeks to highlight edible, nutritional, sometimes unconventional and always beautiful plants that grow successfully in the Florida Keys.

To be clear, this is not a blog... its a catalog of plants. You won’t find weekly entries, styled photos or poetic musings here. We are gardeners. Sharing our experience and basic info with anyone interested in edible landscaping or foodscaping is a joy, but I actually like to garden more than be online…

Fortunately I have a fellow community gardener and foodscaper, Rick Smith, who supports this project and is willing to share his vast website expertise to get it up and growing... pun intended. We are just getting started but the site will evolve as we grow more!

Find here a list of many edible plants we have grown over the last 30 years in Key West. Our hope is others get inspired to foodscape in our wonderful year round growing climate in the Keys.

Although personal health and nutrition are important to us, we are not medical professionals. After years of experience and research we may have a few things to share that you may find informative and or useful, but please do your own investigation about your own personal health considerations.

While protecting the environment, food security and biodiversity are always major considerations, we are not professional environmental activists... just neighbors who have been at this gardening thing a while hoping to share with others and lend a hand to the environment at the same time.

Environmentalism can be more than just trying not to do bad things to the environment... gardening, especially organic gardening, has a significant positive effect on the environment and ourselves.…

Even if you have nothing more than a sliver of land or a few pots you can do something right now to battle the most significant ecological threat we’ve ever faced. Carbon farming expert Eric Toensmeier estimates that his own tiny carbon-rich backyard garden, only about a tenth of an acre, can offset the carbon emissions of one American adult per year. Its easy to start nurturing the soil. Its time.

If your interest grows, again pun intended, with the magic of an internet search there are many blogs, YouTube videos, TikToks and published scientific studies available for your further exploration… for specific info and seedlings feel free to reach out by email to Growkw330@gmail.com.

Happy gardening… it really pays!