Vegetable Gardening for Beginners

Have you ever wished that you could turn your unused backyard into a thriving vegetable garden without much effort? One of the best tips for beginners is to choose easy to grow vegetables.This article outlines some of the more popular backyard vegetables for you to try.

Another tip is to invest in some good books. 'Starter Vegetable Gardens' by Barbara Pleasant is one really useful book for beginners. In it, the author lays out 24 fail-safe plans for vegetable gardens for beginners from a simple bag garden with a few selected plants to even a complex one to supply the vegetables for your whole family.

Another great option is 'One Magic Square' by Lolo Houbein. Click here for a review of this great beginner's resource. But now let's move onto some tips you can implement today.

As a rank beginner, you will naturally want to go for the vegetables that are easy to grow. You will learn that green beans, peas, carrots, carrots and tomatoes fall in that group. Even leafy vegetables such as lettuce and spinach are not that difficult to grow. The best thing is all of these vegetable can be used in some many different ways, from cooking to raw salads.

Beginners are often advised to select a theme before starting, such as a salad, continental, Italian or Mexican, which can give them a better sense of purpose, but this is by no means essential. Or, your theme could be just "easy to grow"!

Beginners will find growing green beans highly agreeable. Green beans like summertime, and they can be grown almost anywhere. Once planted, they do not need much attention, but you will have to water the plants regularly.

If conditions are right, beans grow in such large quantities that you can feed you whole family on beans for the entire summer. Peas are another vegetable that a beginner can do really well with. They come in many varieties and can be grown from spring through fall. You can plant them out in winter in milder areas. The plants themselves are fine with the cold, though the flowers can suffer frost damage, so you won't be eating until late Spring.

If you like root plants, then radishes and carrots are the vegetable for you. Radishes come in many different colors – pink, red, purple, white and others. There are, in fact, more than 250 varieties of radishes to choose from. They thrive without much human attention anywhere with cool weather.

Carrots are also easy to grow and they are not only beautiful; they are also taste good and are packed with fiber and vitamins. Carrots need cool weather with plenty of sunlight. Just make sure to grow them from seed – they don't transplant well.

Leafy vegetables such as lettuce and spinach are also recommended for  new gardeners. They are now only easy to grow, but also make your garden look beautiful. The best thing about them is that their leaves can be picked again and again. Both lettuce and spinach like cool and sunny weather, and they need to be watered regularly.

Pumpkins, zucchini and cucumbers are also good for beginners too. Pumpkins require a long time to grow, but they can be left pretty much unattended after planting. The same applies to cucumbers and zucchinis. They need warm weather and a lot of water, especially cucumber which comes from India. And they do need plenty of water.

And the perennial favorite of every vegetable gardener is a vegetable called tomato which is actually a fruit. More home gardeners in the USA grow tomatoes that any other vegetables. Tomatoes like warm weather and plenty of water, but can be left pretty much alone after they start growing.

Choosing easy-grow vegetables is an important first step for starting your own food production in your back yard, but the number one tip? Just do something. Stop reading this article and go outside, choose a 3 square foot spot in your garden with plenty of sunlight, and dig it over. Pull out weeds or cut out grass, and make a start!

About The Author:

(Read more posts by Betty)

Posted in: Garden by Betty on August 28, 2012 @ 11:11 pm

Comments Off on Vegetable Gardening for Beginners