Hi! My name is Ed Bruske and this is, “How to Grow your Own Vegetable Garden.” We’re going to be showing you just about everything you need to know to have your own garden and grow your own food at home. Everything from; how to pick a site for your garden, watering, selecting seeds, starting seeds, transplanting plants into the garden, mulching, and a whole a lot more.

Some of the tool you’ll need is a straight edge spade for working around the edges of your garden, if you have to lift garden to side to create a bed or to work on your edges. The fork spade is good for loosening soil, also working with compost or getting under plants if you need to get them out of the garden. The long handled spade here, a shovel like that is what you would want for actually moving dirt around and shoveling your finished compost to move it into your garden beds, and then, some kind of a hoe for weeding and cultivating around your plants. I happen to like the stirrup hoe; it actually gets under the soil an inch or two and just wiggles its way around the garden with that nice long handle.

Small weeding tool is good for getting under weeds in tight places and cultivating around the plants without hurting them. Now, this small hand trowel is just the thing you’ll need for making holes in the garden to transplant your seedlings.

Gardening can involve some heavy lifting and sharp objects. So, save your hands wear a good pair of gloves. Wear a wide brimmed hat to keep the sun off and sunblock also, to keep yourself from being burned while you’re gardening.

A little bit about myself, I’m a master gardener and president of D.C. Urban Gardeners. And I have been growing a lot of my family’s food in our garden right here in the District of Columbia about a mile from the White House.

People have been growing their own food for about 10,000 years and it wasn’t until recent generations that, as a society, we started to rely on a vast system of industrial agriculture that uses artificial fertilizers and pesticides to farm on a huge scale. Most of our food now travels about 15,000 miles to get to our plate.

Recently people have gotten more and more concerned about chemicals on their food and how far their food travels; they’re trying to grow food closer to home. So, why don’t we get started now, showing you how to grow your own vegetable garden?