Are you interested in backyard vegetable gardening? I thought readers would enjoy a brief video tour of my garden and some tips on starting your organic vegetable garden this year.
Backyard Vegetable Gardening – How to Start an Organic Vegetable Garden
I started thinking today about how close we are to spring – just under a month, or thereabouts – and how it is time to get my tomato and leek seeds started. I pulled up pictures of the vegetable garden taken over the past two years and decided to make this short video about how to start an organic vegetable garden. It’s a little primer on considerations for organic gardens. It doesn’t go into great detail, but you can see the whole of my garden, plus close-ups of a lot of the vegetables I generally grow. (And of course, the cats made a cameo appearance – or at least four or five of them did!).
What Does an Organic Vegetable Garden Look Like?
We built this garden ourselves. As longtime readers know, we purchased a 17 acre timber farm in Virginia and moved here in 2007. Prior to that, the area you see in these pictures was planted with loblolly pine trees. We cleared them and the builder planted grass for us. We fenced in the area because of the deer population. They eat anything and everything! We ran a PVC pipe underground from the house and threaded a thick, heavy hose through it to run water from the house to the hose you see in the pictures.
The raised beds are built from treated pine. I know some people think treated pine is filled with chemicals that are going to kill them, but the arsenic used many years ago in treated lumber is a thing of the past. Studies from the University of Kentucky show that the treatment used on the wood only leaks a bit into the soil nearest the wood so if you plant the roots away from it, you should be okay. I use untreated lumber for the beds where I plant root crops like onions, beets, turnips and carrots just to be sure.
I have other videos on our growing YouTube channel and hope to add more thing year. Please visit Home Garden Joy on YouTube and be sure to click the little bell symbol to get an alert when I post new videos.
Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.
