If you’re looking to try growing a veggie garden, but aren’t sure where to begin, start with these favourites that will give you an instant feeling of success! Here are the easiest veggies to grow in your garden.
When we first started growing a veggie garden, we decided to try growing the veggies that we ate the most. That sounds logical, right? Well, I’m not so sure that was the right way to begin, to tell you the truth. We ended up putting in a whole lot of work and having some failures that made us almost want to throw in the towel on the whole veggie gardening thing. (I think most gardeners have those moments!) After a few years, I decided that maybe we should just take it easy and grow only the things that we had success with in the past. As I’ve gotten more knowledgeable, I’ve learned that those things that we chose were actually things that are the easiest veggies to grow in any garden and they’re the things that almost anyone can grow. Once we started to get the hang of those easy to grow veggies, we were able to add in one or two new, more challenging veggies over the next few years and the skills that we’d learned from just focussing on the easier veggies really helped us to be able to be more successful with the less forgiving veggies that we wanted to try.
The Easiest Veggies to Grow in a Veggie Patch
Kale
You can read all about growing kale in this post here: How to Grow Your Own Kale. This one is surprisingly easy to grow, especially when you consider the impressive amount of food you can create from such tiny seeds.
Radishes
I love how quickly radishes grow. I grow crop after crop of these every year because I’ve learned that they’re delicious roasted. I didn’t really love them raw before, but I learned how to cook with them once I saw how easy they were to grow!
Zucchini
Zucchini is the veggie that just keeps on giving! You can probably grow enough zucchini to live off of with just two or three plants. There’s a reason why people are always looking for zucchini recipes at this time of year! They just have way too much of it! I think this one probably makes it on most people’s lists of easiest veggies to grow.
Salad Greens
You can read more about how to grow salad greens here: How to Grow Your Own Salad Greens. With just a few little seeds, you can prevent yourself from having to buy those plastic tubs of lettuce for the entire summer. Fresh salad greens are way better than store-bought anyway.
Swiss Chard
Not only does Swiss chard make your garden look beautiful, it also grows really quickly. Like kale or other leafy greens, you can pick leaves from it over and over again and more will keep growing from the same plant until the frost hits in the fall!
Green Beans
There’s a reason why beans are a favourite first plant for kids to grow!
Tomatoes
OK, not technically a veggie, but if you give them a sunny spot and let them do their thing, you’ll have more than you know what to do with! A pot of chili in the fall made with tomatoes that you’ve frozen from your garden is pretty much the best thing ever.
Eggplant
We love to grill eggplant in the summer, so this was a recent “new” plant that we decided to try out, thinking that it would be a bit of a challenge. We were surprised to find that we could grow big, perfect eggplants without any effort at all. Lots of food for very little work!
Honorable Mentions: Sunflowers and Pumpkins
OK, neither of these are veggies either, but we do grow them in our veggie garden every year and they’re great because they can be both food and fall decor at the end of the growing season!
For more info on growing pumpkins, read this post here: How to Grow Your Own Pumpkin Patch.
Here’s more info on sunflowers: How to Grow The Most Beautiful Sunflowers.
So those are some of what I consider to be the easiest veggies to grow! Which ones have I missed on this list?
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.