Discover Home Garden Joy: Your Guide to Growing Food

Home Garden Joy is a gardening website to help people who kill plastic plants learn how to grow delicious, organic food: fruit, vegetables, and herbs. We also include recipes, so you can cook what you grow, and information on preserving vegetables. And, because we believe that gardening is both a healthy activity and can support good health, we feature herb gardening, herbal medicine, and garden-related health and wellness articles.

Jeanne’s Story – How Home Garden Joy Began

Hi! My name is Jeanne, and I am the author and gardener behind Home Garden Joy.

I started this website in 2007 when I first moved from Long Island, New York, to rural Virginia. I wasn’t sure if I would like living in a rural area, but I have found that I love country life! I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Long Island, New York, is a very urban area. The small town where I grew up is right next to New York City. You could see the horses at Belmont Race Track from the English classroom windows of my high school. We could hear the roar from the grandstand on Belmont Stakes Day.

Even though it was such an urban environment, I was blessed to grow up surrounded by gardeners. My grandmother had a large kitchen garden in her Bellerose, Queens, backyard, complete with pear and apple trees. Our next door neighbor owned what was called a “lot and a half” and he literally farmed the half lot, growing everything from celery to rhubarb. He was like an adopted grandfather to me and taught me so much about gardening. My dad, too, loved to garden.

About Jeanne Grunert, Gardening Writer and Educator

Certified Virginia Master Gardener
Worked at Martin Viette Nurseries, one of the top 10 garden centers in the United States
Author of two gardening books
Former “Ask the Expert” columnist for Virginia Gardener magazine (see right)
Garden featured in Virginia Gardener magazine
Lifelong gardener and writer
Expert marketing consultant and content marketer through her company Seven Oaks Consulting

As an adult, I worked at Martin Viette Nurseries, one of the nation’s top 10 garden centers. I worked in marketing and promotions, but on busy days, I would go down to the garden center and help in the greenhouse or the annual plant area. After moving to Virginia, I obtained my Master Gardener certification and volunteered with the Heart of Virginia Master Gardeners until 2016, when I had to step away to focus on my full-time business, the marketing firm Seven Oaks Consulting.

My husband and I do all of the work here at Seven Oaks, our 16-acre farm in the heart of Virginia. We designed formal perennial gardens and planted a half-acre orchard. We built twelve raised beds and fenced them in to keep the deer out. This year, we cleared more land, and plan to build a greenhouse.

We do not give tours or allow visitors to the farm (people ask). We don’t sell produce directly to the public, but we do donate it anonymously to local food banks. Home Garden Joy does not offer guest posts, paid or otherwise. I’m a full-time, professional writer, and this site is 99% my writing; the other 1% is from friends who have covered for me to give me a day off now and then. We welcome followers on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where I share as much gardening knowledge as I can.