Meet LaTasha Harrell of Aneu Harvest

I got to chat with one of my favorite gardeners, LaTasha Harrell of Aneu Harvest for the Grow Your Self podcast. She and I have spent a lot of time in the same gardens back in Houston, Texas, and I can tell you she is phenomenal with all things green.

LaTasha specializes in garden maintenance. She loves working with clients who installed a garden and then lose their way a year or two down the line. She revives their gardens and helps them get their confidence back. This is such an important service because the garden is dynamic and it's easy to bite off more than you can chew.

To start us off, LaTasha is going to walk us through what a year gardening in Texas looks like.

What Does Your Garden Look Like from January Through April in Texas?

In January and February, we're preparing for spring in Houston. We've made it through a couple nights of frost, and then a lot of our winter plants start to phase out as the temperatures warm up in mid to late February. Maybe you've harvested your broccoli, so now it has side shoots. A lot of your salad greens will start to taste a bit different as it gets warmer. Spinach and most of the brassicas will be at the tail end of their lifespan.

March through April is when we start to do the switch over for spring plants. I pull out things that are no longer thriving. It's time to harvest the carrots and the cauliflower. You can plant tomatoes by March. I took a chance this year because I really wanted tomatoes as soon as possible, so I planted them in the beginning of February. I had cherry tomatoes when a lot of people were just starting their spring gardens.

What Does Your Garden Look Like from May Through August in Texas?

We already have temps in the high 90s by June, and now it's time to put in our eggplant and okra—things that will be able to withstand the heat of the upcoming months. We do a lot more pruning on our tomatoes to promote more growth and prepare for the heatwave that's coming. Tomatoes won't produce once those nighttime temps stop dropping below 80°F or so. So I encourage my clients to take those items out of the garden once they're no longer producing. If it's not going to produce anymore, then it's just a place for pests to hide and cause way more problems than you want. Get those plants out of the garden as soon as possible and plant something else in their place.

August begins our second warm season, so we replicate a lot of the things we saw during spring. I really go heavy on the peppers in the fall because the temps over the next couple months can still be iffy. One day it might feel like fall, but then the next day it's 106°F. Peppers can withstand the heat.

What Does Your Garden Look Like from September Through December in Texas?

I like to have a lot of tall plants like eggplant and okra growing in the garden when the fall comes so that they can provide shade when it's time to add lettuces and other fall items.

We get a second round of tomatoes, peppers—all the stuff that must people only get one go at. If your spring was a fail, no worries. Three months later, you get to do it all over again.

November and December is a brassica party, and you're invited. That's my favorite time of the year. We have a lot of our leaves now. I just walk through my garden and graze the leaves before I even make it back to my house. Mustards, collards, lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, arugula, Swiss chard.

Then it starts all lover. So we go year round in the garden in Texas.

How Did You Get into Gardening?

I come from an oil and gas background. It paid the bills, but it was extremely stressful. I never had any downtime. After being laid off in 2016, I was over the hustle and bustle of corporate life. I just really wanted a different scenery altogether. I decided I wanted to go to an ashram in India or Costa Rica to learn how to do breathing techniques and yoga. I just really wanted to mellow because I was so corporate all the time. 

I ended up getting my yoga certification, but I never made it to India or Costa Rica because it was the same year my daughter was graduating high school. My yoga studio in Houston had like a walk-through sanctuary, and the instructor would just broadcast herb and flower seeds on either side of the walking path. Everything was growing right next to each other, and it just looked very much like something nature created.

I loved it. That was my first experience with the ability to heal myself through herbs and food that we can so very easily grow in our climate.

I started buying plants, but my first mistake was going to Lowe's and Home Depot and buying herbs and plants that were not in season. I bought some raised beds that I got from online and started trying things here and there. When I noticed I wasn't having very much success with plants from Home Depot, I found nurseries that I'd driven right past during my corporate days.

And How Did You Get into Garden Consulting?

Originally, I found that my plants weren't growing well. I had a bunch of 2ft x 3ft beds, and I would stick all of my kale in one bed, all of my lettuces in one bed, and I didn't think to separate them or add in the herbs that would repel pests. So I'd have one bug come in and wipe out the entire crop. My entire kale—gone.

That's when I got into companion planting and learned the Gardenary way to interplant plants that work well together to keep the pests down. And then from there, I was like, "Okay, now that I've learned how to properly plant, I would absolutely love to teach this to others so they're not making a lot of the same mistakes that I made."

Even while I was working to complete my yoga certification, my heart was gravitating toward gardening. In order to pull off some of the positions for yoga, I knew I needed to be healthier and have more energy. I realized there was another component here that I needed to focus on before I could teach, and that was what I was eating.

I dove more into my health and wellness internally, and what I was taking in was far more important than being able to shape-shift my body into a pretzel. I thought I needed to wear all white and walk around in a safe, quiet place to find peace, but instead, I found it in my backyard garden.

Then I had my son. He has some food aversions, and there are a lot of things I can't get him to eat from the grocery store. But he loves our garden, and his love for it just makes everything worthwhile because I created my business to allow myself the freedom to raise him differently than I did my daughter while I was in corporate. I vowed to make a complete change.

My son and I are in the garden, dancing and having fun, and he's seeing something that he planted by seed sprouting. It's still a struggle to get him to eat, but his excitement in seeing what he created is beautiful. I often wonder how many of my clients feel that excitement from seeing what was untapped potential in their yard turn into a thriving garden space.

What Are Your Best Tips for Growing Tomatoes?

What I love about tomatoes is their versatility. I always have a conversation with my clients to determine what their intentions are. Do they want an indeterminate plant that'll give them a lot of tomatoes over a period of time, or do they want a huge harvest at the end so they can make tomato sauce? Knowing their intention is super important for what type of plant I would suggest they put into their garden and also how many of it. Do they want the unruliness of a huge plant, or do they want to keep it simple and just have a few tomatoes to satisfy them?

Everyone in Houston wants tomatoes—the beginner gardeners, the experienced gardeners. Tomatoes make everyone feel super successful. So making sure they have exactly what it is they desire for that particular season is super important.

I love growing vining tomatoes on arch trellises. If it's for a client, I'll usually do two on each side if they're committed to trellising. If they're a novice, then I'll stick with one and encourage the plant to branch out so the client won't be overwhelmed with tomatoes and the commitment of pruning.

I've learned the best way to plant a tomato is to go all the way down to that first leaf node and pull off the bottom leaves. Dig a pretty deep hole, add some compost, and then plant the tomato low in the soil, up to where those bottom leaves were.

About 30 days after planting, you should start to see the first little flower buds. Then we'll go in and add a blooming fertilizer to encourage more blooms to get more tomatoes.

Really focus on pruning in the beginning to encourage more growth. Keeping too many branches makes it difficult to maintain later. After a while, you can let it do its thing so it can cover the trellis and give you nonstop growth.

Prune the tomato suckers if you want better control over how wide the plant will branch out. Doing so requires less overall maintenance.

What Advice Would You Go Back & Give Yourself When You Were Learning to Garden?

I would tell her to get out of her head. Stop trying to rationalize everything. I had to move away from that corporate mindset of everything needing to make sense and be black and white. Gardening is an experience. What works for one garden may not work for the next garden because it's not a black-and-white scenario. We are dealing with Mother Earth.

Just love every part of it. Don't go in with hardcore expectations because every single garden is different. Every season is different.

Release the expectations. Trust the experience.

What Do You Want Your Legacy to Be?

Your garden doesn't have to look a certain way. It's not one body type. It's not one situation. It's not one demographic of people. The garden looks very different on everyone, and it's for everyone.

I love when I have a client who says they don't have a green thumb. Actually, they just haven't had a little Tasha. I can set up their space so that they'll face minimal issues. When you're off to a great start, it makes things so much easier to maintain.

The garden doesn't have to be cookie cutter. I remember way back when vegetarian food all looked the same, and you couldn't find it at regular stores. Now it's mainstream, and everyone can get their hands on it. Gardening is the same. You can start on a patio, you can start in a small space. You don't have to look a certain way or live in a particular neighborhood.

There's something for everybody, and I love that about gardening.

Grow with LaTasha

LaTasha is an inspiration, and I'm so honored she's part of Gardenary. I've loved getting to garden with her over the past couple of years. She's changing the world one family, one non-cookie-cutter garden, at a time. Make sure to head to her website. Follow her on Instagram. Book her ASAP if you live in Houston because she's about to be real busy once everybody decides they want to garden with her!