Forget anything you’ve heard about “green thumbs.” Anyone can raise a little food for themselves, no matter where they live—no experience necessary. Once you’ve tasted success with vegetable gardening, you’ll be eager for new challenges. If you’ve never grown food before, we’ve put together this list of choices that are sure to bring you a lot to eat without demanding much attention. For gardeners who are ready to level up, we have suggestions for crops that can be a little more challenging but so rewarding to try.
Starter Kit
Cherry tomatoes
You get masses of little tomatoes that you can just pop into your mouth from a single plant. You can choose from varieties that bear red, orange, or yellow fruit and in different sizes and shapes. For your first try, you can’t go wrong with ‘SuperSweet 100 Hybrid’, which yields loads of scarlet, cherry-sized tomatoes. If you grow in containers, go with ‘Veranda Red Hybrid’. The dwarf plant reaches only about 1 foot high and wide but pumps out bunches of sweet and juicy little fruit all season.
Salad greens
Lettuce, spinach, and other leafy vegetables grow during the cool months of spring and fall, leaving room for warm-weather favorites for your summer garden. Varieties such as ‘Looseleaf Blend’ let you cut just as much as you need at a time and then produce tender new leaves for weeks. If you live where temperatures are warm in spring, you can try ‘Igloo’, a lettuce variety prized for its heat tolerance. Arugula is another easy-to-grow leafy green.
Green beans
Fresh eating beans, sometimes called string beans or snap beans, produce a steady supply of pods for weeks in summer. If space is limited in your garden, try pole bean varieties such as ‘Kentucky Wonder’, which grow on long vines that reach more than 6 feet tall. They need a stake or other support to stay upright, but they take up little room in your garden. For more spacious gardens, consider ‘Burpee Stringless Green Pod’, a productive bush variety that needs no staking.
Zucchini
The green summer squash is one of the most productive vegetables you can grow. ‘Summer Fordhook’ zucchini is a highly productive heirloom that produces lots of smooth, dark-green fruits from early to late summer. No matter which variety of zucchini you choose, be sure to check the plants daily for new squash to pick. They can appear almost every day!
Radishes
For a quick and satisfying harvest, sow seeds of radishes as soon as your garden’s soil is workable in spring and then every couple weeks after. ‘Pink Beauty’ has mild-tasting, rose-colored roots ready for picking about three weeks after you plant them.
Challenge Class
When you’ve mastered the basics and are ready to try your hand at growing crops that need more attention and care, consider these five options.
Broccoli
Depending on where you live, you can grow spring and fall crops of super-nutritious broccoli. ‘Marathon Hybrid’ is adapted to a wide range of climates and is ready for harvest about 75 days from transplant. Sprouting broccoli varieties, such as ‘Montebello Hybrid’, bear lots of smaller side shoots rather than just one solid head.
Carrots
Preparing the soil is extra-important for growing carrots so the roots can reach their full size. The looser the soil, the better your carrot harvest will be. ‘Ya Ya’ is a favorite of cooks for its extra-sweet, bright orange roots. If your garden’s soil is dense or heavy on clay, try ‘Short and Sweet’, which produces 4-inch-long roots. As a gardener, you get to grow crops that are not often seen in stores, like ‘Kaleidoscope Blend’ carrots. It yields a mix of colorful carrots in rich hues of purple, red, yellow, and white, along with the usual orange.
Melons
Cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon grow on long vines that can easily overtake a small garden. But if you have room for them, you will discover that your vine-ripened, fresh-picked melons are so much sweeter and juicier than store-bought fruit, which is typically picked before it’s ripened to allow it to be transported without spoiling. ‘Burpee’s Ambrosia Hybrid’ has long been a favorite for gardeners because of its luscious fragrance and extra-sweet flavor. ‘Sugar Baby’ watermelon starts bearing dark-green, 12-pound fruits in midsummer.
Potatoes
If you’ve never eaten a freshly dug potato, you will be surprised to find that they’re a bit juicy when you cut them open. They’re also much more flavorful than the dry types you find in supermarkets. Potatoes are grown from seed potatoes, which are chunks from last year’s harvest that have an “eye.” You plant them in a trench or in a large breathable bag (like burlap) and cover them with soil. As the green plants sprout up on top, you add more soil to the bed or bag to keep the potatoes covered. When the leaves on top die back, you can dig up your buried treasure. ‘Yukon Gold’ has yellow skin and fluffy yellow flesh. For more drama on your plate, go with ‘Purple Majesty’. The skins are dark purple and the tender flesh is violet colored.
Heirloom tomatoes
\Almost every gardener agrees that the best-tasting tomatoes are the old-fashioned varieties. The fruit tends to be so fragile that it can’t be transported, and the plants generally don’t produce near as many as modern hybrids do. But if you want the most flavorful homegrown tomatoes, plant ‘Brandywine Pink’, winner of many independent taste tests over the years. ‘Mr Stripey’ bears one-pound, sweet tomatoes with streaks of red and yellow outside and in.
Of course, you don’t have to be a veteran of many seasons to have success with any of these crops. With Burpee’s Guide to Getting Started, beginning gardeners and experienced growers have all the resources they need to enjoy an abundant harvest in every season.