Favorite Easy to Grow Vegetables
I've compiled a list of easy to grow vegetables that are great for beginners. They are also sure to find their way into your garden year after year.
Lettuce
Lettuce is easy to grow and it provides great salads throughout the growing season. The secret to growing lettuce in the hot, humid south, is to use patio containers. I have two such containers on my patio. I prefer leaf lettuce because you can cut what you need and it will continue to produce new leaves. Succession planting will allow you to continue to have salads until your first frost.
Fresh LettuceCucumbers
I love when the cucumbers start maturing. I eat them salted or dipped in hummus. When I am picking them every day, I may have them for breakfast and lunch. You can start them from seed indoors, plant seeds directly into your garden or buy transplants to put in your garden.
Potatoes
Potatoes are a fun and easy vegetable to grow. When they are ready to harvest it is like going on a treasure hunt. I place my seed potatoes right on my garden bed and throw some hay on top. As the plant grows, I keep covering it up with hay until it flowers. That's it! When the plant dies, the potatoes are ready. It is fun to dig and find the potatoes you have hiding under all that hay.
Radishes
If it weren't for my dear friend who loves radishes, I would have never tried growing them. She loves them so much though, so one year I bought some seeds and tossed them around the garden. A short while later, I invited her over to pick her radishes. It was as easy as that. Now I even like the radishes so I have to plant enough for me and for my friend.
Fresh Picked RadishesCarrots
Carrots are a fun and easy to grow vegetable. I mix my carrot and radish seeds and sow them together. The carrots take a little longer to sprout and it's a bit longer before they are ready to harvest. Once they are ready, they will start pushing up above the soil line. It is very likely your home grown carrots will not be long and straight but they will be delicious.
Green Beans
Green beans are easy to grow and they are pretty versatile. You can plant your seeds into the garden once you've gotten past your last frost. You can eat green beans raw, in salads, roasted, sauteed or boiled. That touches on a few of your cooking options. There are much more. If you don't like them one way, I urge you to try cooking them another way. I spent years saying I hated green beans because I didn't enjoy them the way my family cooked them. Then when my son was in kindergarten, I was asked to bring the green beans for the Thanksgiving Feast. I set out to find a way to cook them other than the way my family had been eating them for years. I found a recipe for Japanese-Style Sesame Green Beans and I can no longer say that I don't like them.
Peppers
Peppers come in a wide variety. You can get hot, medium or mild peppers. Not only are they an easy to grow vegetable, hot peppers are also good to have in your garden to deter some garden pest.
Peas
I mentioned before that one of my earliest memories was of me and my granny shelling purple hull peas. Peas are super easy to grow and shelling peas is something for the whole family to get involved with.
Tomatoes
Did you think I was going to leave out tomatoes? I like to grow all sorts of tomatoes in my garden, but they are not all easy to grow. The tomatoes that are easy to grow are the smaller tomatoes. These are your cherry and grape tomato varieties.
A Final Note about Easy To Grow Vegetables
In gardening, you will find that one year you have great success with a vegetable and the next year it just won't grow. Don't let that get you down. Every vegetable plant has a pest or disease that is common for that vegetable. If a pest or disease gets one of your plants, uproot it and get something planted in its place. As your garden soil gets healthier and you learn about pest and disease management, you will have more successes than failures. Pick a few vegetables that your family will enjoy. Get good at growing those and next year add a few more. Keep planting and enjoy the process.