I don’t really think that I would recommend tomatoes as a first try crop. If you find yourself really wanting to grow tomatoes, start with one of the many cherry or plum, small varieties, they are more forgiving and will produce.
Leaf lettuce is a no brainer. Radishes do well, grow fast, and produce in about 30 days. The can split open if the watering in uneven, so an unexpected few days of rain can cause problems.
For a novice gardener I would say you should buy container plants rather than start from seed. Squash, as mentioned, is almost fool-proof. Cucumbers are very easy and will grow even if you forget to weed the spot. Plant a rosemary plant and it will live for years and nothing will ever eat it.
Things like beans require support, corn requires a large area grown in a block as it is wind pollinated. Carrots require deep, well prepared soil. If you start with some of these traditional vegetables you may be disappointed.
First year do the easy crops, next year, a bit more challenge, etc. Small steps will reward.
While lettuce is not difficult to grow, you have a shorter window in more southern climes in which to grow it (once the weather turns warm, lettuce starts to bolt (send up a seed stalk and become bitter). On the other hand, if you set out tomatoes after the designated safe planting date (check your local university ag dept. or other reliable source for the safe date in your area), you’re pretty much guaranteed tomatoes by early summer if they’re planted in more than half day sun.
There are dwarfish varieties of tomatoes so you don’t have to bother with staking. Some even spill over the side of a container like flowering annuals in a hanging basket. A good-sized nursery should have tons of varieties in spring.
Home grown vegetables are the most expensive in America taking into account the cost of seeds, starter soil, composter, and your time.
You get what you pay for.
Besides, what else are you going to do with your time? Watch t.v.?
I’d look into raised beds, so you can sit on the wall to weed. And cherry tomatoes in containers by the back door, so you can eat a couple warm from the vine when your go in and out.
I grew tomatoes when I lived in New Jersey. Ones from the store were better, but garden ones are about the same. My garden there was based on chicken poop (my house was built on what used to be a chicken farm) whereas my garden here is based on horse poop.
Which leads to my advice. Unless your soil is great, find a barn, drive out there with some black plastic bags and a shovel, and ask if you could raid their manure pile. They usually have to pay to get it hauled away so they should be happy. Poop from where my daughter rode transformed my awful soil full of clay into wonderful soil.
Also, compost.
Potatoes. Easy to grow and they taste great right from the garden. You don’t have to do much either and they will sprout from whatever you have in your pantry.
The last time I tried growing tomatoes the ground hogs treated themselves. So now I get heirlooms from the farm market and they are way better than anything I could ever produce.
I almost never get many tomatoes here, they just get blight most years. My mother lives a few hundred miles away, and gets loads… I do better with beans and parsnips than her though.
If you don’t do well with a plant, try something else! A lot of beginners try going all out, then don’t get much harvest (for whatever reason- wrong varieties, planting too densely or too soon) then give up. Just some cut 'n come again salad leaves and tomatoes would probably get you something nice without too much effort. And maybe squash. They’re really satisfying.
If you’re the one who left those huge inedible club-like zucchini in our break room, we’d like to have a word with you. :mad:
But that happens with zucchini. You miss one hidden under a leaf and before you know it, it’s grown to an enormous size and is fit only for whacking the groundhog that’s invading your vegetable patch.
Monstro, you’re getting some conflicting information here (“Grow tomatoes!” “Don’t start with tomatoes!”) because different regions have different advantages and challenges, while different plants have different requirements. Here in Texas, for example, cherry tomatoes and hot peppers are easy because we have a long, sunny growing season … but lettuce or spinach is more difficult because, this freaky winter notwithstanding, our “cool” season is usually one or two slightly chilly afternoons. (I keed, I keed … a little.) Tomatoes and peppers die at the first frost, while lettuce and spinach positively relish a light snowfall.
Do you mind telling us more-or-less where you live, or even just generalities like what your hot/cold/rainy/dry weather is like? That will go a long way towards providing basic, straightforward, and hopefully less-conflicting info.
Your mother & sister will likely have more advice, too.
Concur that in general, in the spring/summer, good beginner veggies are green beans and squash/zucchini (if you have the vertical space) and radishes and herbs (if you don’t) to get a feel for how this whole dirt + seeds + water + sunshine thing works.
Oh, and I just noticed, you didn’t really specify if you want to grow in containers (esp. if you have an apt. with a balcony) or in the ground (if you’re one of the landed gentry) but as a general rule:
Containers:
advantage: you can start with packaged store-bought potting soil instead of the potentially crappy/sandy/clay soil you have locally
disadvantage: smaller soil volume and roots lifted above ground level means you have to be more vigilant about watering regularly and protecting from summer heat and winter freezes
In-Ground: pretty much the reverse!
advantage: more forgiving of irregular water esp. if you get supplemental rainfall, plus it’s easier to set up drip irrigation (or leave the hose dripping)
disadvantage: unless you’re really lucky, the local soil will probably need to be tilled and/or amended
I agree with most of what you said, purple, except that I live in Texas too and have had good luck with leaf lettuce. On the other hand, I didn’t expect it to last all summer; I ate it all spring and well into the summer by moving the container into a shady afternoon spot, then let it go in the middle of August. Spinach I planted in August for fall harvest but this year it froze! Nobody told me it was gonna freeze in Texas! Gah. So it just goes to show that no matter what you do, mother nature is gonna surprise you. (I think that’s what my dad the farmer used to say.)
Man, I must be doing it all wrong. I don’t compost or fertilize or any of that mumbo jumbo and get vegetables out the wazoo. I may weed if they get tall enough, but other than that I pretty much just leave it alone to do it’s thing. Other than the actual sticking the seeds/plants in the ground and putting up my pea and cucumber fences, I do pretty much nothing to my garden. It’s really a miracle anything grows there as my property used to be where the barns for the first school in town were and I think may have been used as a dump at one time because I’m constantly digging up coal and pottery pieces and glass and pieces of metal out of it that the frost heaves up.
There is a definite meme out there that absolutely no one has fertile soil from the get go. I got that line when I first started talking about my garden here, too.
Now, a lot of suburban building from about 1975 onwards did use the technique of scraping all the topsoil off the site, leaving clay or sand or some similar quasi-sterile crap, selling the “black dirt” for profit (often to suburban home owners trying to improve the “soil” their home builders left behind), then capping the crappy substrate with a thin layer of sod. Such unfortunate people do need to tweak the “soil” they live on, and since there are a bunch of them they assume everyone else’s ground is the same.
It’s not the natural state of affairs.
There is another subset of us who live on land that was never scalped in such a manner. We have dirt that is actual soil and does not require elaborate soil amendments to have a garden. Amendments might help us make incremental improvements, but they aren’t necessary. My current residence was built about 80 years ago, before the “scalp the yard” technique was in vogue, and the backyard is honest to Og prairie sod. It’s about 8 inches of black dirt and roots, believe me, I’ve bent and broken several steel garden implement trying to break sod back there to expand the garden. From day one it was as fertile as a tribble and after several years of composting and tilling it produces like a tribble on fertility drugs. Seriously, it thaws out pregnant. Every spring I wind up with a dozen or so vegetable plants that either survived the winter or self-seeded. If it was any more fertile I’d be afraid to go sit out back for fear of an immaculate conception just by being around it.
There’s no way to know what you have until you go outside and dig a hole.
This, by the way, is one reason why a container plant or two is a good introduction for a true beginner - it takes that one particular sort of guess work out of the equation.
I have a modest 4x8 raised bed, and I grow a couple heirloom tomatoes, some Hungarian Wax peppers, and an assortment of herbs. One year I grew a German Queen tomato that weighed in at 1 pound, 11 ounces.
I once kept a much larger garden, with a variety of veggies. Eventually I stopped growing the ones that weren’t any better than I could buy, such as green beans, and the ones that didn’t grow well here, such as carrots.
I made a lot of mistakes, but as one expert gardener said, you can’t call yourself a fine gardener unless you have killed a lot of plants. He also said, “There will always be weeds. So what?”
Think of a garden as a pet that has to be walked every day even when it’s hot and buggy. And watered, and fed. And groomed (weeded) even when it’s hot and buggy. And even when you don’t feel like it or have something better to do.
If that kind of commitment sounds worth it then grow some vegetables and enjoy!
I had a yard like that here - I went out back to dig myself a little garden plot, and boy, was I surprised! Two inches of topsoil over top of the native clay and gravel. :mad:
I was raised by prairie farmers who gardened in prairie yards - I had no concept of a yard not being deep, rich topsoil, and all you had to do was just dig it up and start planting.
