Michelle Obama's Groundbreaking Garden

After her husband's groundbreaking 2008 campaign for president, First Lady Michelle Obama did a little groundbreaking of her own when she planted the first garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden during World War II.
Obama and local schoolchildren planted the garden on the South Lawn in March and made their first harvest in June. Start-up costs totaled just $200. Get tips on how to grow a garden like Obama's. Already, the 1,100-square-foot garden has produced hundreds of pounds of food that have been used for official dinners, according to White house chefs. (Not that there haven't been setbacks, like the reports about the patch's lead contamination. Levels were well below what the EPA considers dangerous and are now even lower.)

The chefs have a lot to work with--the garden includes 55 kinds of vegetables, including spinach, broccoli, carrots, rhubarb, fennel, shell peas and more. One notable exception? Beets, which the president hates.

In this exclusive video from the White House garden, only on AOL News, White House food initiative coordinator and assistant chef Sam Kass explains how he and Obama used seeds from Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, who was an avid gardener.

A vocal proponent of healthy eating and workouts (those arms!), Obama said she hopes her garden will encourage other families to take small steps toward better meals. "Part of the message is that if the president of the United States can sit down with his family and have dinner, hopefully more families find the time to do the same thing," Obama says in the video.

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