Video:How to Start a Food Garden

Transcript:How to Start a Food Garden

Hi! My name is Jesse Rosado, and I'm here for About.com, and today, I'm going to demonstrate how to start a home garden.There's a lot of good reasons to plant a home garden and grow things like tomatoes and lettuce and other vegetables. Those products are expensive at the grocery store, and so it'll save you a lot of money.

Prep the Food Garden Bed

So what we're going to be planting today is a couple of tomato plants here. The first thing I'm going to do is I've got these stakes here, and I'm just going to drive them a little bit into the ground. This stuff is called mason's twine - it's just a little rope, but you can use just about anything, though. I'll just tie a little piece around here.

What I like to do is just follow the edge of the rope, make a little cut - a continuous one - to pull the sod up. Get down to what looks like the bottom of that grass root system. Really get after it and get that grass up. So what I'm going to do is put these little pieces of scrap wood around the border. That's pretty much what this finished bed looks like.

Plan Where to Plant Your Vegetables in Your Food Garden

Now the first thing I'm going to do is plant my tomatoes. I've done a nice indentation there, and I'm going to go down to the soil so I make a nice little hole in the center of the garden. And basically with tomatoes, dump them out like that, you've got a nice root system there. I'm going to go ahead and bury it right up to this first little nub - that looks about right. You're going to just tag that so somebody knows what you're growing.

Water Your Food Garden Regularly

What I've got here is just a really nice bag of compost peat. I'm going to put a little bit around the base of the tomatoes. The last step is to water the plant. I'm just going to make sure all these plants get a nice drink of water. The root system of all these plants that I just transplanted in here would take a couple of days to set in and take hold. The best time to water is early, early morning, or right before the sun sets, just so you're not burning up any plants during a really sunny day.

Alright folks, so thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the web at About.com.