Sowing Seeds of Kindness: Jenn Slone Shares Gardening Expertise and Seeds with Ross County Residents

Chillicothe & Ross County Public Library (CRCPL) Access Director, Jenn Slone’s love for gardening extends to sharing her wealth of knowledge, seeds, and skills with the rest of her community. Jenn’s passion for seed harvesting/saving has led to the creation of CRCPL’s seed library, where all patrons can get five packs of seeds per trip to grow their own plants at home.

Jenn has recently collaborated with Ross County Health District (RCHD) Creating Healthy Communities (CHC) Coordinator Jordan George on multiple projects, including the planting of the Bainbridge community garden at Paint Valley Ministries and the successful Garden Smarter Not Harder garden class at the Paxton Library in Bainbridge in May 2025.

Jenn’s passion for finding innovative ways to garden successfully is palpable as she shares helpful methods and tips for getting started and learning through trial and error. I sat down with Jenn to chat about her journey of how she got started, as well as what inspires her to share what she has learned with others.

Sara Smith: How long have you been gardening?

Jenn Slone: I started out helping my dad in his garden. He would always give me the onion sets and have me plant them because he said I planted the straightest rows, and I think that really encouraged me. My mom grew a lot of flowers, so I always helped her with that. I took vegetable gardening in 4-h so I can remember having to take a project where I grew vegetables, and then I had to make a scene with them. I had a cherry tomato that was a ladybug and all these pretty things that were all put together, and I won a giant trophy for it.

That encouraged me when I was younger. Then as I became an adult, I ended up living in an apartment with no yard for eleven years, and I felt like a rat in a cage. I had a teeny tiny balcony, and I covered it with pots and grew whatever I could. I’m from Waverly, so we experimented with some community gardens there. Then in 2016 I bought a home with some land, and it’s about three acres wooded. The half-acre that has sun, I have every inch of it built out with a garden now. So, pretty much my whole life, I’ve been doing some sort of gardening.

Sara: You mentioned your father, that you gardened with him a lot. Was he who taught you how to garden?

Jenn: To begin with, yeah. I mean, everyone had big rectangular in-ground gardens, so I learned that form of gardening where you go to the garden center and you buy a flat of each kind of crop. You bring it home, stick it in the ground, and then you just wait for harvest, treat bugs, and stuff like that. When I got my new house, I was mostly trying to figure out how to start gardening with limited resources because I didn’t have a rototiller. I didn’t have a tractor, and I just had a giant patch of grass out there, so I started following different gardening accounts on Instagram and watching YouTube. Roots and Refuge Farm was a huge channel that I learned a lot from.

I first started out trying a pallet garden where you put down some cardboard on top of the grass, and then you put a pallet on top of it, and fill that with dirt so you’ve got straight little rows. Then the second year, I wanted to move that pallet. When I lifted it up, I realized the cardboard had all broken down. It was the most lush, black, dark soil underneath with earthworms, and it was like a light bulb went off. I realized that was a way that I could do gardening. Then I found Charles Dowding, a British gardener. He’s pretty much the grandfather of no-dig. He has a YouTube channel and writes books. We have the books at the library, I’ve made sure to get those. He teaches about no-dig gardening and every year in his gardens, he will do a dug bed along with a no-dig bed and then weigh the harvest. He always gets more harvest out of the no-dig bed.

Every inch of my garden has been made out of covering it with Chewy and Amazon boxes. You use brown corrugated cardboard, basically shear your grass really low, lay that cardboard down, put a bag or two of compost on top of it, and then you can pop holes right into the cardboard and dig down and go ahead and plant your plants right away. I like to do them in the fall because they’ll break down by the spring, but if you want to do them in the spring, you can do that too. It’ll smother out the weeds. It’s really good for the environment because it doesn’t till up old weed seeds and bring them to the surface. Instead, it smothers it and keeps it down below. Every year, you just add another little layer of compost on top. Also, worms love cardboard, so they will eat it. It’s a soil conditioner. It will condition your rocky clay soil underneath. The worms will eat that cardboard, and, then they leave worm castings, and that is great compost. This way, you also don’t kill the worms when you don’t till. It’s a lazy and efficient way to garden, because you don’t need a bunch of equipment to do it, and anybody can do it.

I’ve even seen people go out in fields where they want to start putting pollinator flowers throughout a field. You can take a tiny piece of cardboard and do a small patch, and just drop in some wildflower seeds. They’re gonna grow from there. So it’s just been kind of revolutionary. So I started doing that and then just learning from all kinds of gardeners online and the reading books, garden books. A couple of my favorite books are Roses Love Garlic and Carrots Love Tomatoes. There are books that tell you what plants to plant together, which is called companion planting, to benefit each other. For example, if you plant basil with tomatoes, it makes the tomatoes taste better. Most people know about planting marigolds as a pest trap, and there are a lot of different plants that can do that. I pay attention to crop rotation because I have blight, like most people do in the Ohio Valley, on my tomatoes, so I have to make sure every year I move the tomatoes to a new bed so that they’re less likely to catch the diseases from the last year. I’ve learned all of that online and in books, basically, just in the last ten years.

Sara: So the blight, for example, that’ll stay in the same spot and won’t spread?

Jenn: It can, yeah, and it’s usually just related to moisture. Where we’re down in a kind of valley, things get trapped there, but I don’t know anybody who doesn’t end up with some kind of blight on their tomatoes. It’s when your leaves at the bottom start yellowing and then the best you can do is just remove those yellow leaves as it goes up, and then more tomatoes will produce at the top. It also makes it hard because you don’t want to share your seeds, and I’m a huge seed saver. I’ve started seed libraries at all the libraries, but you can’t really share that seed with someone because you’re going to pass on diseases unless you do the fermentation method of cleaning the seed, which is where you put the seeds in a jar of water and let them basically stink on your counter for, like, a week until that, juicy jelly seed coat breaks off. Then you can clean the seeds. That’s too much work for me. Everything I do, I like to I don’t know if you’ve ever heard K-I-S-S: “Keep it simple, stupid” but I like to keep things really simple, keep it fun.

My other motto in the garden is “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Don’t try to be perfect, just plant a seed. Just plant that plant, and something great will happen. You just have to try. he only reason I’m good at gardening is because I’ve killed a lot of plants. (she laughs)

Sara: What would you say your first gardening success was? Something that would be notable for you?

Jenn: My first gardening success, I think, came when I learned how to save seeds. That happened because I joined a Seed Swap on Instagram where I had to send in 240 packets of seeds, and then I would get that many back from all over the country from all kinds of different people. That was hard. My first seed swap, everyone got marigold seeds because those are the easiest to save, and I got back so many seeds of plants I didn’t even know existed, so I was able to really branch out and start just planting all kinds of unique things. For a long time, I planted stuff I wasn’t even going to eat because I wanted to watch it grow, so that was huge for me.

Also when I learned about winter sowing, that revolutionized the way I was gardening. Because in a milk jug, you can grow a hundred plants at least. I start those January 1 so in the doldrums of winter, when I have seasonal affective disorder, I can start getting my hands in the soil.

I keep a garden journal, and I’m always drawing diagrams of where I’m going to move all of those crops to for crop rotation. That gets me thinking warm thoughts in the winter and has me doing something. I basically have made it where I can garden year round because in the fall, I’m doing seed swaps, and I’m packing up all the seeds I’ve saved. I just make it a habit of keeping Dixie cups in my harvest basket and if I go out to harvest crops and I see a brown seed head, I just stick it in a cup, write on it with a Sharpie, and then they go on a shelf in my basement till the winter when I’m watching Christmas movies, and I want to sit down and package everything up.

That’s really how the seed libraries here started. There was a year that I had packaged up 500 packs of seeds, and I thought, “What are you gonna do with all of these?” James said to bring them in, and let’s start a seed library, which I had started one when I was down in Waverly at their library too, and I knew how successful it was.

Real success was when I was able to find things that revolutionized gardening. With winter sowing, I wish I had documented everything that I’ve grown, because I literally have thousands of plants in my garden each year, because of those milk jugs. I’ll have 50 milk jugs lining my sidewalk in the winter, and they sit out there in the snow and everything. The mailmen are just like, “What is this woman doing?” But if they look at them, they’ll see little green sprouts starting in early spring because the way that works is, nature just tells them when to germinate, and then they germinate on their own. Some plants need cold stratification. Their seeds need to be frozen and thawed to get water in them so that their seed coats crack. That just helps with that process. If you’ve ever seen a pack of seeds that says to put it in the fridge for a few weeks before, that’s what that does. So it takes care of a lot of those steps for you in a really easy way.

Sara: What advice would you give to a new gardener?

Jenn: Keep it simple, and the perfect is the enemy of the good. Those are the two things that I tell everyone. Just try something. Crops can be expensive, and it’s heartbreaking when you have failure but with things like the seed library, when you can come to the library and get five packs of seeds each trip and for nothing and you don’t ever have to bring them back, it’s not like they have a due date. We do love it when people grow something and then harvest seeds and then bring us back some seeds after they’ve harvested, but that takes a while for people to learn. Just like me, that first year, I did one plant. So I say, if you want to save seeds, try saving seeds from one plant this year. Just try one flower or one crop that you want to grow. Don’t go for something hard. Try something simple. There are lots of things that grow really easily from seeds. Come take a look at our library out here. Everything out there was grown from seeds. Now I’ve got tomatoes and peppers and loofahs that I started in my basement under grow lights, but everything else, every inch of that garden, is planted with seeds directly, so it’s not hard. You just have to keep an eye on them, keep them watered, give them a little love and care. Beyond that, you know, just don’t try too hard. Start small. Try something, but don’t try too hard.

Sara: What do you enjoy most about your garden today?

Jenn: Just the variety of plants that I have. I went plant shopping on Mother’s Day with my daughter, and then I just went to Groovy Plants Ranch in Marengo over the weekend. When I go shopping now, I look for things that I think I could share with people. I find weird things that I’ve never seen before, and I think, oh, people would love these seeds, or people would love to propagate this plant. My garden’s like the testing ground for what I can share with everyone else. I’m always trying to find unique things to put there that I can share with others.

Sara: In your opinion, what are the greatest health benefits of gardening?

Jenn: We have a really messed-up food system where we don’t know what’s in our food. You know, sometimes you get potatoes that are green or tomatoes. Jessica from Roots and Refuge Farm says that store-bought tomatoes taste like disappointment, and I agree completely. There’s no reason to eat a store-bought tomato, but if you have ever eaten fresh produce, that is the number one thing that you could do. You know where it came from. It didn’t go on a truck. You didn’t have to release gas emissions into the air. You can go right to your backyard and pick it. Fresher is always going to be better and healthier, and it’s just delicious. That for me, especially not having all of those extra costs and the cost of the environment, and you’re beautifying the environment. I know that a lot of my seeds get spread to my neighbor’s houses, and flowers are going to attract pollinators, which will pollinate their food crops. So if you have both hand-in-hand, you’re going to have more food crops. I just think it’s much healthier for the environment and for the body.

Sara: You’d also mentioned a little bit earlier, seasonal affective disorder, that doing the winter sowing helps with that as well. Do you think gardening is also a great benefit for mental health?

Jenn: I don’t know the exact science, but I think there’s evidence somewhere about putting your hands in soil and it releasing endorphins or something like that. But, yes, it is just very therapeutic. It’s a meditative art. So when you know that you’re going to go out and just weed a garden, I totally zone out and I’m meditating almost and thinking about the big issues in my life while I’m just nonchalantly plucking out, or if I’m angry, rage pulling weeds is really helpful. It’s definitely helped me get through the sad parts of winter.

Sara: What inspires you to get involved with public health in our community?

Jenn: I am at a point right now with the world where I feel really helpless. I think it doesn’t matter what side you’re on or anything, I think a lot of people feel helpless right now. For me, I’ve struggled for a while trying to figure out what I could do to help. What can I do to fix this problem? Any of the problems. There are lots of them right now, and this is what I’ve come up with. I’ve been doing this and it brings other people joy. If I can teach other people to be less reliant on our food systems and help them grow their own food or help them improve their mental health, man, I see it. When people come to our garden programs, they linger for a long time after the program’s over, talking to each other about plants and I see how much joy it’s bringing people when they’re little kids out there, and I’m trying to maintain the garden beds. They want to climb right in and help. I think we need to have some garden programs for little ones because they have a huge interest in getting their hands in their dirt the dirt too. I’m mostly trying to make a dent in just the sadness and difficulty that everyone is having right now, and that helps you feel like you have some control over something.

Sara: What’s your inspiration for spreading the love of gardening and growing food with our community?

Jenn: The other part of that is I was a poor kid with food insecurity growing up. There was a period of time when all I ate were the deer my dad harvested and the stuff growing in our garden. I can remember having to be on food stamps and having to go places where you could get a box and take commodities. I got all of that stuff when I was little, so I’m really grateful for those networks. I just think that learning to grow your food is just another thing to add to helping people make sure that they have food in their bellies. I definitely went hungry sometimes when I was little, so having gone through that, I know how much more important it is for people to learn these kinds of skills.

Sara: What message do you have for the community to get involved in service or sharing their skills with others?

Jenn: It’s that feeling like you have some control, like there is some way that you can make your life better and the lives of people around you better if you have a skill that other people don’t have. I didn’t realize how in demand gardening skills were going to be until I started doing it and really connected with Jordan (RCHD CHC Coordinator) and then she started giving me all sorts of opportunities. It’s brightened my life so much knowing that I can use the skill that I developed to help myself feel better, but I can share it with others to help them feel better. I think right now too, not just does it make you feel like you’re doing something, I think community care is important right now. You can have control over what’s happening in your community. You can reach out and help people that you know or the people that live near you. Ross County is such a great community with lots of resources. That’s one thing that Jordan and I are doing, trying to pull together all of the different gardening and food resources and farmers who have excess produce to give away, so that we can maybe network them with the food pantry so that that food can go to people who actually want it and need it. Every time I’m out building a garden, somebody stops and asks me questions about it. That just tells me that we need more people doing that kind of work and educating people.

Sara: Do you have any other messages for the community or maybe a takeaway tip?

Jenn: If you want to build a garden, let me know! I can help design a garden, I can help provide seeds and plants, I’ll come and plant it for you…I love to do that kind of stuff. I have a lot of materials on our website, crcpl.org/seeds. There are a lot of tutorials at the bottom there about how to use a harvest and everything that a garden should have. I’ve got a guide there for a new way to garden, which includes all of my weird, lazy, efficient gardening methods, like no-dig and winter sowing.

My newest favorite is seed snails, where you take just a strip of plastic, fabric, or foam. You pack some soil onto it, roll it up into a snail, and then plant your seeds on the top. You can grow a ton of plants in one little tiny compact thing.

My goal, too, is to break the bonds of big A agriculture that destroys our lands and destroys our birds and our bugs. My garden is an organic garden. All pests are allowed in. I don’t like tomato hornworms. Those are the scariest things in the garden, but if I leave them be, eventually, a parasitic wasp will come in and take care of them. So if I just kind of keep my hands off and let nature run its course while I’m tending to the plants, that seems to be the best partnership.

I’m here to help, basically. If anybody wants to learn anything, I’m here. We’re having a lot more garden programs at the library now because we’ve been getting tons of feedback about it, so always watch our calendar for gardening events. Come and stop by the main library.

Once we have food that you can harvest, feel free to take home something for dinner. We want you to stop into the library and weigh it first. Let the staff weigh it so that we can keep track of what we’re giving out, but nothing brings me joy like seeing our patrons at the bus stop eating their breakfast from our garden, and that’s what happened last year. I love that. Come check it out. Get hands-on, ask questions, and just try something.