Are you interested in learning to garden or getting better at raising your own food? Here are a few of our top picks at The Garden Grounds market garden that are easy to grow on you own.

Who doesn’t want to take advantage of a lower grocery bill, higher quality food, and the health and happiness that comes with growing your own vegetables in your backyard? The inspiration may come from understanding where your food comes from. Or maybe you’re prepping for food scarcities and striving for self sustainability. I could be that the idea of a homesteading lifestyle has caught your attention.

No matter what has inspired you to learn how to garden, there can be a lot to learn at the beginning, and even more along the way. Don’t let it overwhelm you. The most important thing is to try. Relax, nature is truly on your side.

One way to make gardening easier is to purchase young plants, called sets, from a garden center or local grower. This is a great way to speed up your success and not have to worry about nurturing young plants. But, it’s a tradeoff to start this way because you’re going to significantly increase your upfront costs, sometimes to a point that you’ll pay more for the young plants than you would for the same vegetable, in maturity, at the store.

Seeds are the answer. For a couple of dollars you can, for example, grow a field of lettuce. That’s less than the price of one of those pre washed bubble packs of organic salad mix at the store.

Here’s a way to stack the odds in your favor, and save money by starting from seed! Try choosing from this list of easy to grow vegetables for your first gardening adventures. These choices are easy to find locally at garden centers and big box stores, sometimes even the grocery store. A quick search online, however, will lead to higher quality seeds of varieties you may never have seen before.

1. Lettuce

This is one of the top sellers for us at the farmers market, and that’s no surprise. The pre washed bags and bubble packs of the leafy greens in the grocery store are a quick way to have enjoy a healthy meal, and we’ve gotten used to the convenience. If you enjoy that experience, you’ll love the flavor of lettuce fresh from the garden.

Lettuce is an early season crop. After you passed the risk of your last frost for the year it’s time to plant lettuce seeds. You can start even earlier because lettuce can handle a few light frosts without dying, but why risk it? Keep it simple.

Lettuce seeds are very small and you’ll be surprised how many come in a little seed pack. We like to plant them quickly by creating a 1/4″ or so deep groove into the soil with side of our hand, or by wiggling the edge of a board or a stick into the dirt. Lightly watering the surface if your soil is dry will help the seeds get a good footing.

Then carefully sprinkle the seeds into the groove you made trying to leave about an inch to a half inch between each seed. Tedious? Yes. The cheat? You can be less careful with your seed sprinkling into the groove, you’ll just have to thin the plants out later for them to fully mature.

Now just gently push some soil from the side of the groove to lightly cover the seeds. Water lightly again and wait about a week or two. If you can, keep the soil moist with an occasional watering if you aren’t getting any rain. Pretty soon you’ll start to see young lettuces popping up.

After the young lettuce is about 4 or more inches tall you’ll want to thin, or harvest, some of the plants to give other room to mature. Don’t throw these away, cut them off at ground level and wash them for a salad. The back of your seed packet will almost always provide you with spacing for your lettuce plants. Spacing really makes a difference for a full head to form, typically you’ll want your plant to be about 4-6 inches apart.

It will vary by conditions and the type of lettuce you grow, but your plant should be ready to harvest in 30-60 days from seeding. You can help the plants reach their fullest size by harvesting every other plant as you go.

Lettuce Growing Tips:

1. Lettuce is a cool weather crop, so plant early and plan to replace it with something else when summer heat kicks in. Heat will make lettuce bitter and “bolt” growing stalky and setting a flower.
2. Keep the soil moist, not wet. Lettuce prefers moist soil and will struggle to grow and also get bitter when left dry.
3. Plant your seeds more shallow than you think. A little sunlight through the thin soil covering is needed for lettuce to germinate.
4. Try cut and come again harvesting. You don’t have to cut the entire plant out when harvesting, you can pick the largest leafs from the bottom of the plant leaving the rest to mature and harvest when you come again.

Easy Lettuces To Grow:

1. Black Seeded Simpson: This old fashioned, or heirloom variety is easy to grow and great for cut and come again harvesting. It’s more resistant to heat than other types of lettuces and slower to get bitter. It creates massive, light green leaves and is perfect for salads and sandwiches. Plus, because it’s an open pollinated heirloom plant you can let some of them continue to grow into the summer. They’ll set a flower, then develop seeds like a dandelion that will scatter around your garden and likely show up next season as surprise lettuce plants!  Find it here: Eden Brothers
2. Red Romaine: Romaine lettuce sometimes seems to get grouped into the category of iceburg lettuce. Shunned by “real” gardeners for more unusual varieties all while missing a great chance to grow an easy head lettuce. We grew this for the first time in the spring of 2022 and were amazed at the size, beauty, heat resistance and of course excellent taste of Red Romaine. Bonus! Red Romaine is also an heirloom and you can save the seeds, or let them fly in the wind for future harvests. Find it here: High Mowing Seeds

2. Radishes

You’ll here us talk about this again and again on this website and at our market stand. Vegetables grown in the garden will change your opinion about grocery store produce for the rest of your life. We’re dead serious about this. Case in point? The Radish. I never liked them that much. Then I decided to grow a few because they’re one of the fastest and earliest season crops to get on your plate at the start of the growing season.

In fact, these could probably be considered the easiest vegetable to grow. Give them a shot this spring, you might be surprised how these crisp and juicy red jewels will add a refreshing and enjoyable bite to a standard salad. (You should add some to that Black Seeded Simpson and Red Romaine salad you might be thinking about growing this year.) Ready to harvest in less than 30 days these little speed racers are fun to grow. Here’s how!

Just like described above, you can plant radish seeds the same way you plant lettuce. Create a 1/8 – 1/4″ deep groove in the planting bed. Then create additional rows in the same way, parallel to the first and about 4-6 inches apart. Radish seeds are pretty large and round which make them a lot easier to space in the grooves you made than say, tiny lettuce seeds. Take a little extra time and space them apart about 1/2 the width of the mature radish. in most cases this will be 1/2 to 1″ apart. Check your seed packet for super valuable info like the size of the radish you are growing and ideas of when to plant and harvest!

Finally push some soil into the groove, or push the two sides together to bury the radish seeds. Give them a light watering and faster than you imagine, often within a few days, you’ll start to see sprouts with two little heart shaped leaves peeking out of the soil. Those are your baby radishes getting ready for your futures snack.

In a couple weeks, if things have gone well, you’ll want to thin out any radishes that have come up too close together. Those young plants are tender, and you don’t want to damage a young root crop, so the easy way to thin them is with a pair of sharp scissors. Just cut the unwanted plants off at ground level. You don’t have to thin, but if you do you’re likely to have a larger harvest per plant. 

Another option is to wait until about 3 weeks or so when tiny radishes are poking out of the ground and thin any radishes that are touching another. You’ll be able to eat the younger, baby radishes and leave the remaining radishes to mature for another week or so.

Radish Growing Tips:

1. Like lettuce, radishes are a cool weather crop. In fact, you’ll have a hard time getting them to germinate in the warmer summer days, and any radishes you planted will quickly “bolt”. They’ll grow a thick stems and start to flower while at the same time the radish bulb will become hollow, thick skinned and inedible.
2. Water levels really effect the taste of a radish. More, and regular waterings or rain will mellow the flavor out a bit and give them a delicious crunch.
3. Just like tomatoes a fast and heavy rain, or allowing the soil to dry out for a long period of time coupled with a heavy watering can quickly cause radishes to split. They’re still just fine to eat, but sometimes a bit harder to clean. It’s really more of an issue if you plan to sell the radishes at market.
4. Don’t wait to long to harvest your radishes. Allowing them to grow to long past 4 weeks will lead to a larger… and almost completely hollow radish.

Easy Radishes To Grow:

1. French Breakfast Radish: These radishes are a little different from what you’re used to seeing. they are long and tubular with a beautiful white base and a red top at the leaves. They’re more on the mild side, with less bite than most, which makes them easy to snack on raw. It’s said that the French enjoy lightly pan searing these radishes and serving them on toast. I’ve never tried this, but I’ll tell this is one of my favorite radishes to eat. Find it here: Johnny’s Selected Seeds
2. Cherry Belle: This radish is the classic radish. It’s exactly what most would picture in there mind with it’s round, pure red root that grows to about the size of a ping pong ball. They have a pure white center and tend to have a bit more kick, especially if lightly watered. I’m pretty sure you can find these in the produce isle, but I promise you those will seem dried out and bland in comparison to a Cherry Belle fresh from the garden. Find it here: High Mowing Seeds

3. Garlic

It might surprise you that garlic is easy to grow. It is, but timing is key! While most vegetables are planted in the spring or summer for harvests during warm weather the same year garlic is a cold hardy crop that needs to planted around the time of the first frosts to be harvested the following year in early summer. While you may find seed garlic, or garlic that has been selected for high quality and screened for any disease issues, for planting at local suppliers you’ll probably have to turn to an online vendor for quality and variety.

The range of flavors and varieties offered to the home gardener and small farmer are mind blowing. Just like we’ve said time and again, home grown garlic will change your appetite for anything grown in the store. That’s mainly because the vast bulk of garlic sold in the United States is grown far away in countries like China and shipped for weeks before arriving on your produce shelf. Store bought garlic is almost always soft neck and is definitely one of the mildest flavors in the garlic world. It’s not bad, it’s just tame. To be clear homegrown garlic is necessarily hotter, it’s just more complex in the range of flavors you’ll notice.

Back to growing! You can check out an extensive guide to growing, harvesting and storing garlic here. For now we’re going to keep it simple.

After sourcing your seed garlic from a vendor like Keene Garlic online, or from a local company, you’ll want to wait until your first light frost. You can plant your garlic well into the late fall and early winter as long as you get it into the ground before it freezes. Typically the earlier you plant, the earlier your harvest will be.

Each garlic bulb contains several individual cloves. Each clove will grow another entire bulb of garlic over the period of half a year. You’ll need to gently remove the papery skin off of the bulb to reveal the cloves, but do your best not to strip the thick, often smooth coating off of the cloves. If you cook with fresh garlic often you’ll know that is pretty hard to remove, in fact it’s been the inspiration of many techniques and even inventions to try to make the difficult task easier!

Plant your garlic into a loosened bed. You can till if that’s your thing, or use a garden or broad fork to loosen the soil. It’s not a bad idea to add a slow release fertilizer or aged manure or compost. We use only certified organic additives, but any balanced slow release fertilizer will help the garlic on its way to success.

There is a pointed top on each clove where the garlic will send up a shoot, and the flat bottom is where roots will dig into the soil. So do your garlic a favor and keep the pointy side up when you plant it.

It’s typically easy to poke finger or two into the dirt to make a hole, then drop a clove in each hole burying it about an inch deep. The cloves should be spaced about 6″ from each other, but follow any directions provided from your seed garlic packaging.

Finally, if the soil is dry you can give the planted cloves a good watering then cover the bare soil with a thick mulch of aged grass clippings, wheat straw, or something similar. This will protect the garlic from the coldest days and make your life easier in the growing season by suppressing weeds that would otherwise compete with your garlic for nutrients, light and space.

Usually within a few weeks to a couple months you’ll start to see green tips emerging from the mulch. The garlic will slowly send up its stem and grow on warmer days while going dormant when the weather is cold. Don’t worry about frost and snow, these soldiers will survive with no problems.

Come late spring and early summer your garlic will likely be a couple feet tall. Regular watering and and additional round of fertilizer will keep the garlic growing. The exact harvest time will vary from variety and based on your location, but there are a couple tell tale signs that harvest is coming.

First, if you grow a hardneck variety (more on that later) you’ll notice the stem of the garlic will start form a pointed bud like tip and start to head for the sky. That’s known as a garlic scape. It would eventually become a flower if left to grow, but it’ll steal nutrients from the garlic bulb you’re growing along the way. So, when that scape starts to turn in a full circle, just like a pigs tail, you’ll want to cut or pull them off just above where the highest leaves meet the stem. 

If your garlic doesn’t put up a scape, don’t worry, you’re growing a softneck variety. For both types you’ll know that harvest is near when the leaves at the bottom of the plant start to turn yellow and die off. That’s not a disease, instead it means that harvest time is just a few weeks away. Wait until the bottom 1/4 to 1/3 of the leaves die back and it’s time to harvest.

Rather than trying to yank the garlic out of the ground you’ll want to use a garden fork, small shovel or spade to push into the ground several inches away from the stalk, then pry away from the plant with the shovel or fork to loosen the ground a bit. This should allow you to easily pull the garlic from the ground and gently brush the dirt off the roots and bulb. We recommend harvesting after a few days of dry weather when the ground is less saturated with water.

Your garlic is ready to eat, just like it came from the store. You can simply strip the outer layers off of the bulb and cut the stem off. This garlic will be a real treat, and different from what you’re used to as the entire bulb will be tender and the cloves very juicy.

You can not only cure your garlic for long term storage, but you can save your biggest and best cloves for planting that fall providing another year of garlic next season. But, that’s a top for another article, and we’ve written that up here if you’d like to learn more.

Garlic Growing Tips:

1. Buy your seed garlic from a reputable grower. We’ve had success with both Keene Garlic and the Maine Potato Lady. Keene seems to have access to more growers while the Maine Potato Lady is a great, but smaller operation that sometimes has to make substitutions in an order based on growing conditions.
2. Don’t plant grocery store garlic. Will it grow? Most likely. But there are other factors at play. That garlic is often over a year old and is less likely to thrive. It’s often been treated with chemicals to keep it from sprouting in the store, which also keeps if from sprouting quickly in the ground. Perhaps most importantly it can contain funguses or other disease that would not harm you to eat, but could spread to any garlic you grow in the future ruining future harvests.
3. Choose a softneck garlic if you are in the Southern half of the United States, and a hardneck or Italian variety of you are in the Northern of the country where winters are colder. If you live in the middle, like we do in West Virginia you can try your hand at both types!

Easy Garlic To Grow:

1. Inchelium Red: This is an artichoke variety of soft neck that is very similar to the type of garlic you buy in the grocery store. Each bulb will have as many as 20 individual cloves and the garlic will store well for a long time. Find it here: The Main Potato Lady
2. German Extra Hardy: This is our favorite. It’s a hardneck garlic that forms massive cloves and just seems to be the easiest hardneck we’ve grown when it comes to yielding super flavorful, large cloves that allow you to spend less time in the kitchen peeling garlic. If you’re a garlic lover in the mid to northern half of the U.S. we recommend growing German Extra Hardy. Find it here: Keene Garlic

4. Summer Squash

Sure, the jokes are real. Growing summer squash starts out as an innocent gardening experiment. You plant a packet of seeds or buy a few sets at your local garden center. In a few weeks that squash plant puts on leaves that are larger than your face and beautiful yellow/orange flowers change to those tasty yellow or green vegetables we love to grill or fry.

Each day you harvest a handful of these delicious veggies. Those feisty, determined plants just keep on keepin’ on. Maybe you go out of town for a couple days, or forget to harvest one of two squash… the next thing you know you’re finding surprised zucchini the size of your thigh. The pile on the kitchen counter is so high that you’re googling zucchini bread recipes and making squash omelets. Pretty soon you’re “gifting” the prolific bounty to your neighbors ring and run style – dropping them on doorsteps in unmarked brown bags and running in desperation before you’re discovered.

It’s all worth it, though. And the fact that these vegetables take on such an aggressive growth habit is what makes them a great crop for new gardeners. The success rate is high, and the crop is delicious.

There is an incredibly wide variety of squash available to the gardener by seed and set, and the summer squash category alone is massive. Summer squash are the soft skin varieties that are eaten soon after picking. Zucchini are just one variety of summer squash, and the yellow varieties, usually with a curved, swan neck stem are as the other well known category.

Winter squash, on the other hand, are the thick skinned long storing type. The most well known are the butternut, spaghetti and acorn squash. These varieties, if well seasoned, can store for months providing garden fresh meals all winter long.

I encourage you to grow your summer squash from seed. It saves you a few dollars and you won’t lose much, if any time over starting with a seedling from the store. When the weather is consistently above 50 degrees and frost is long gone it’s time to plant your squash! For most folks in the United States this will be late May, early June.

Squash seeds are large,  and the mature plants are even larger, so dig your holes about 3 feet apart and 1/2″ or so deep. I usually plant 2 or 3 seeds per hole spaced about an inch apart, cover them, water and wait.

In less than a couple weeks you should see your young plants breaking through the soil and forming leaves the resemble a maple tree or grape vine. After your plants have set several leaves select the larges of each group and trim off the others if all your seeds germinated. The mature squash plant is going to need all the space it can get!

In a couple more weeks you’ll start to see beautiful light orange flowers starting to bloom. Those flowers are critical to your harvest because interestingly enough summer squash are self pollinating. The set both male and female flowers then depend on the wind and pollinators, like bees, to move pollen from the males to the females. You’ll know the females by the tiny squash flower base.

With at little luck, that is where your squash will form. 

These summer growers are fairly thirsty. They’ll need at least an inch of rain or watering per week. Slow released, balanced fertilizer is also key as they’re heavy eaters. You can turn some into the soil before planting or shake some around the base of the plant and water it in.

Once you start to notice young squash on the plants that are over 4 inches long keep an eye out! The biggest mistake, and the source of all the squash jokes, is allowing the squash to get to large before harvesting. They should be harvested are around 6 inches for yellow squash and around 8 inches for zucchini. Try to pick them before their skin loses their shine for the most tender eating and to avoid nearly hollow squash logs filled with near inedible seeds.

It’s possible to spin summer squash off their plant by rotating them several turn while holding the squash inline with their stem. The safest way, least likely to harm the squash or its plant is to use a knife or a pair of hand pruners to cut the squash from the plant with minimal damage to both.

These veggies will store just fine at room temperature if you’re going to eat them within 24 hours. Otherwise, pop them in the fridge and they’ll last for about 4 days if kept over 50 degrees.

Summer Squash Growing Tips:

1. Avoid overhead watering when possible, instead place your hose or watering can at the base of the plant to keep moisture off the leaves. Even better, use a soaker hose or other irrigation method. Squash are very susceptible to mildew, and keeping those leaves dry will reduce the likelihood of it setting in.
2. Harvest, harvest, harvest. Daily if possible. These plants produce more veggies than you can imagine, but if you allow the squash to get huge they’re going to slow their production and your harvest won’t be nearly as tender and tasty.
3.  If you stagger your squash planting in what we call successions, basically sewing a few sets of seeds every few weeks, you’ll maintain a steady flow of young, tender squash until frost ends the show.

Easy Summer Squash To Grow:

1. Crook Neck Squash: We’ve grown a few yellow squash and this old time favorite has become our preferred variety. It has a buttery texture, grows easily and produces aggressively. They don’t get as large as some yellow squash, if picked regularly, which keeps the danger of squash overdose in check. Find it here: 
2. Dunja Zucchini: This zucchini is fast to harvest, has more space for easy harvesting between the leaves, and has good resistance to powdery mildew and other weaknesses that can take down a zucchini plant in its prime. Find it here:

5. Cherry Tomatoes

Hands down if I could only grow one vegetable it would be the tomato. I know, technically it’s a fruit, but we’re going to make an exception because if there’s one crop that could bring more people to the gardening side it’s a just picked, vine ripe tomato.

Here’s why. Tomatoes, by nature, are very delicate. They’re mostly water, have a thin skin and just don’t travel well. But we love them. So the industrial food system has invested millions of dollars and decades of breeding to create a tomato that can be easily picked, is durable enough to be transported, has uniform size, uniform color and won’t ripen too quickly. While the resulting varieties, that you’ll find in the grocery store and on your burger at most restaurants, are less a tomato and more a tennis ball with a wet center. Bland, mealy, thick skinned, strangely shiny and devoid of significant flavor. But boy do they ship well!

Trying to capture the remarkable flavor difference that a garden grown tomato, in particular an old-time heirloom variety, in words is something I’ll try to tackle in a future article. For now, just trust me and try it. If you’ve never had a homegrown tomato, I’ll argue you’ve never truly tasted a tomato at all!

Here’s the good news. Tomatoes are strong growers, usually manage to produce fruit even when disease kicks in, and most varieties will keep on fruiting aggressively until frost.

Here’s even better news. Cherry tomatoes are even hardier, faster to harvest, and easier to  grow than their larger, slicer cousins you’ll find on burgers and in BLT’s. In many cases, they have a much sweeter flavor as well.

Tomatoes are either determinant or indeterminant varieties. Most cherry tomato varieties are indeterminate, meaning they’re going to fruit for an undetermined amount of time. Long story short, indeterminate varieties are going keep setting fruit until they die, either by disease or frost. What that means for growers like us is that we’ll have a full summer and most of a fall to savor these little red jewels!

There may be more strong feelings around how to grow tomatoes than any other plant in the garden! From planting strategies, to pruning strategies, everybody has their own methodology for how they’ll win the first tomato of the summer race. We’re going to take the easy route in this article.

You’ll definitely want to add fertilizer to the soil when planting, and in addition to a standard slow release (organic preferred) adding a calcium rich amendment like bone meal will give you an even better chance of a bountiful harvest.

Dig your holes about a half inch deep and plant 2 to 3 seeds per hole. You’ll want to wait until ALL danger of frost has passed as tomatoes will not tolerate or thrive in far below 60 degree air temperatures.  Water those seeds when planted, and do your best to keep the soil moist but not waterlogged as your tomatoes grow.

Space your holes about two to three feet apart and get ready for a summer harvest! In a week our two you’ll see young tomatoes emerge, first with two slender pointed leaves and soon after larger mature leaves will form. About this time you’ll want to select the largest and healthiest young plant of each group you planted in a hole and cut or gently pull the weaker ones out. Like the squash, and most plants, it’s good to start with more seeds than you actually need, but thin them out to allow the strongest plants to thrive.

About this time you’ll need to provide some future support for your cherry tomatoes. They’re going to form long vines before the flower and fruit, and these vines are going to need some support to help the tomatoes receive more sunlight and keep the fruit off the ground and away from pests like slugs and ants that are just waiting on a summer snack.

The tomato cage, that you’ll find at any garden center, are the easiest way to support a cherry tomato. Pro tip – Tomato cages are conical and wider at the top than the bottom. The wide part is often mistaken as the base, but in fact the narrow part with 3 or 4 pointed wires sticking off of it is the actual bottom. Those pointy skewers are meant to be driven into the ground and the wider top allows for the plant to bush out and maintain airflow.

Now you’ve chosen your strongest plants, given them support and a little food for their journey. In about a month and a half (trust us, it’s worth the weight) you cherry tomatoes are going to create a jungle in that cage and you’ll start to see yellow flowers turn to green marbles and soon ripe cherry tomatoes. Get to picking! The harvest is just beginning and it’s not going to stop until frost.

One thing’s for certain, you’ll be forever craving these tasty tomato snacks and forever spending your winters dreaming of warm weather each time you bite into a bland, watery grocery store cherry tomato.