Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Promoting environmentally sound gardening practices for over 35 years!
Homegrown Pantry is a guide to planning, growing, and preserving vegetables, fruits, and herbs, with the goal of eating from your garden throughout the year. You will enjoy browsing through the pages and admire the beautiful photos, in addition to benefiting from all the excellent advice.
Gardeners usually think of winter as a time for taking stock of the year’s successes and failures and then planning for the upcoming growing season. One important task they should consider before designing new beds or perusing seed catalogs is preparing their gardening tools for off-season storage. Tools that are well cared for will last longer, take less effort to use, cause less damage to plants, and help to prevent the spread of diseases.
The Complete Kitchen Garden: An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs & 100 Seasonal Recipes, by Ellen Ecker Ogden, is a delightful book that combines vegetable garden design, organic gardening tips, and recipes.
A stroll through the Demonstration Gardens of Glencarlyn, Simpson, and Bon Air leads one gently along the curves that define the paths and plantings. The softness and seemingly indeterminate order comfort the eye and make one anticipate the next bend. By contrast, a stroll through the Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), in Potomac Overlook Regional Park in Arlington, Virginia, is a study in protracted straightness. Bean plantings form straight lines, their pole supports vertical and sturdy. Tidy pathways surround other rectangular beds of eggplant, tomatoes, and chard. Groomed and towering, the garden visually satisfying and inspiring. But tucked in a corner of the OVG, near the country-red shed, lies a bed that is different from all the others. It is neither large nor long nor rectangular. Its crops are not in straight rows. It is a 4-foot by 4-foot square overlaid with a grid of 16 1-foot by 1-foot squares. This is the Square Foot Garden.
Written by the MGNV Organic Vegetable Demonstration Garden Master Gardeners, with special thanks to Debbie Siegel and Tom Laughlin. Five Things About Growing Tomatoes Are you growing tomatoes this year? Here are …
Organic Vegetable Garden, October 4th As we make our way into fall, our garden still thinks it is summer, as is evidenced by the bounty of warm season crops we …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), July 3rd: Many urban and suburban gardeners may believe that there is no room for vegetables in their yards. A successful vegetable garden is dependent on …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), June 21st: Last summer we grew Malabar spinach for the first time. Malabar (also known as Indian spinach, Ceylon spinach, basella, or vine spinach) is not …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), June 2nd: For a second year in a row (yes, there is a pun here) we are growing our tomatoes on trellises. Based on research, tomatoes …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), May 30th: The previous week in the organic vegetable garden we have been finding many, many slugs happily feeding on our lettuce, broccoli, strawberries and the …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), May 12th: For the past week we have been harvesting beautiful strawberries from our patch in the MGNV Organic Vegetable Garden in Potomac Overlook Park. We …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), May 9th: While setting up your friends can have varying results, choosing the right companions for your vegetable plants can help ensure successful outcomes. Companion planting …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), April 21st: As heartbreaking as it can be, you just got to yank out some of those cute little seedlings when they start sprouting in a …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), April 5th: We have been busy in the organic vegetable garden preparing our beds for all the little seedlings that are being nurtured under grow lights. …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), March 15th: While many people are focused on the wearin’ o’ the green this week, we have been working on the planting of the greens—lettuce, spinach, …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), March 6th: We added three raised beds to the garden this weekend.Raised beds are a great choice for growing vegetables for a variety of reasons. You …
Organic Vegetable Garden (OVG), February 15: Finally, we’ve had a little winter, but our thoughts are turning to planting—particularly peas (Pisum sativum) in the demonstration Organic Vegetable Garden at Potomac …
