Welcome to Grow Your Health Gardening!

Our mission at Grow Your Health Gardening is to educate and inspire individuals on how they can better grow their own fruits, vegetables, and herbs at home to live healthier, more productive lives.

We aim to provide resources in all forms of gardening:

• soil based gardening
• aquaponics
• hydroponics
• aeroponics

The goal is to grow your confidence in growing a variety of healthy foods no matter what growing zone you live in around the United States and beyond.

We will also share resources on how to incorporate natural foods into your diet through convenient and helpful healthy products (like JuicePlus+ ), recipes, and cooking tips.

Feel free to take a look around and dive in to growing your health through gardening!

About Erin Castillo:

Erin Castillo, Owner of Grow Your Health Gardening, has loved growing flowers and food throughout her life-time. She grew up helping on her family’s dryland wheat farm in the state of Washington. Her grandmother would grow a large garden for canning and feeding large crews and Erin recalls harvesting from it for evening meals.

In 2004, Erin and her husband and twin sons moved across country to Atlanta, GA. Upon arriving to the Southeast, she soon discovered the growing conditions varied greatly from the soil biome she was accustomed to in the Northwest. She battled the poor growing conditions of clay-ridden soil and soil-based insects. To add to her frustrations, she disliked weeding in the hot humidity of Atlanta’s summers and wanted to find a new (and albeit an easier) alternative that would overcome these obstacles while also maximizing growing on her one-acre.

Determined to figure out how to successfully grow food, along with a strong desire to teach her five children a life skill she felt was essential, Erin began learning about growing food using alternative methods; Hydroponic, Aeroponic and Aquaponics.

Over the course of a year (with the help of her husband), she constructed a bato-bucket (also known as a Dutch Bucket) system and successfully grew Heirloom and Hybrid Tomatoes, Italian Parsley, and Basil. The following year, she added an indoor aquaponics system which was fertilized by two beautiful Koi in a closed system containing two half-drums filled with clay balls. In this system, she grew herbs and Aloe Vera under a UV light.

In 2018, Erin’s husband experienced a heart-attack with a 99% blockage that he survived by the grace of God. In his recovery process, both Erin and her husband decided they needed to incorporate more fresh fruits and vegetables into their daily lifestyles and they needed to ramp-up quickly. They decided to invest in a family set of three Tower Garden Aeroponic / Hydroponic Vertical Growing Systems (by JuicePlus+) and found immediate success in growing 84 herbs, greens and vegetables in as little as a 2.5′ x 9′ space. Today, Erin runs 12 (8′ tall) Tower Gardens indoor and outdoors and two lines of Bato Buckets (and ever expanding).

Erin is also experienced in preservation methods for optimizing what is grown at home harvests including canning, dehydrating herbs, greens, fruits, and vegetables, as well as making her own true hydrosols using a copper still.

Erin and her son, Joshua, are graduates of the Seed Saver Exchange Seed School and are pledged Seed Stewards. Together they currently run Grow Your Health Gardening Seed Co. that specializes in hydroponic-adapted seeds. Erin has studied under Dr. Elaine’s Soil Food Web School, the Georgia State Extension, and also holds certifications from Upstart University specializing in Hydroponics, Aeroponics, and Aquaponics as follows: