Joe’s Blog

This week marked a big milestone in The Twenty-five Dollar Victory Garden. I officially crossed over the 100-pound mark of harvested vegetables! But what do I really show you to mark this momentous occasion, a big pile of veggies? Nah…how about the awesome tomato pie I made from those homegrown tomatoes that put me over [...]

What a difference a couple of weeks make. The picture in this post represents a bittersweet milestone in the Twenty-five Dollar Victory Garden. I took this shot four days ago. I’m not sure why I waited this long to post. I guess it's partly due to facing the fact that my garden has already, in [...]

Wow, mid July and The Twenty-five Dollar Organic Victory Garden has produced almost 35 pounds of vegetables. Although the lettuce is pretty much finished, everything else is still producing away. I have at least 60 tomatoes on the vines of the eight plants, all at varying stages of development. Between those and the cucumber factory, [...]

I admit to being a little slack this week. I had the best intentions to have this latest post and video up before the forth of July holiday. But the closer we got to that date, the less motivated I became. And based on the activity on Twitter and Facebook, I’d say a lot of [...]

  This post does not include a video but if you'd like to see them for this series on The Twenty-five Dollar Organic Victory Garden Challenge, click here to view them on YouTube. I realize that if I only post a blog entry every time I have a new video to show, you're not getting [...]

(If you'd like to watch this video in better HD quality, click here to view it on Vimeo) So, this is what I love about gardening. There is never a dull moment. Just when one challenge subsides (incessant rain), another one presents itself, hence the title of this latest video, “Oh Deer!” According to my [...]

To watch this video in better HD, click here to view on vimeo. So this video was shot two weeks ago. As you’ll see, I gave you a taste of the incredible amount of rain we’ve been getting here in North Carolina and all around the southeast. At one point as the rain is coming [...]

It’s finally beginning to look a lot like a garden, or at least the makings of one. Now that that I’ve cleaned the slate, it’s time to roll up my sleeves and get down to the business of creating that twenty-five dollar victory garden I’ve been talking and writing so much about. This video as [...]

Episode 5: Joe vs. Nandina dumbasstica – My Twenty-five Dollar Victory Garden Challenge from Joe Lamp'l on Vimeo. The video posted with this blog entry chronicled a period spanning about eight days, finally wrapping up two weeks ago. It chronicles my battle with what I thought was a benign row of Nandina domestica, or as [...]

Freecycle.org comes through again. So far, it’s helped find a taker for my Nandina plants I needed to have removed to make room for my Twenty-five Dollar Victory Garden, and someone else to come take away a truckload of gravel mulch. Today (finally) I found my source for free wood to contain my raised bed. [...]

Recently I had the great opportunity to talk about starting a vegetable garden for another GMA related segment in New York. And specifically, they gave me plenty of opportunity to talk about doing it for under twenty-five dollars. They even devoted six whole minutes to tell the story. Believe me, that's a lot of time [...]

Well, the video editing backlog is starting to pile up. I taped this segment two weeks ago and finally pieced together enough time during my travels over the last week to get this posted. As you'll see from watching, I'm off to a great start, thanks to a little help from my virtual friends on [...]

Ironically, as much time as I’ve spent over the last several years being involved in the TV business, I have NO experience shooting video myself. Sadly, my girls are 9 and 11 now and I don’t have any video of them to speak of (bad dad!).  But there’s no time like the present to start [...]

What a great day for a little positive gardening PR. Thanks to so many of you writing, blogging, tweeting and basically shouting about all the important benefits of gardening, the world is starting to finally hear us. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to have Michelle Obama breaking ground for the new Victory Garden on the White [...]