The 10 Easiest Vegetables to Garden

The Best Crop Options for First Time Gardeners

Beetroot is a golden opportunity for the beginning gardener, because it is extremely low-maintenance. Beetroot can be sown directly into the soil and requires nothing more than moist earth while it grows. After approximately 90 days, your crop will be between the size of a golf ball and tennis ball and will be ready for harvesting.

This means Rainbow Chard, Swiss Chard, Bright Lights Chard, or Silverbeet. When the weather starts to cool down, and most other garden crops are finished flourishing for the season, chards of all types will continue to grow, and in a wide array of colors! Chard is known for being slug resistant and a cut and come again crop.

Squash is notorious for thriving in summer gardens. Not only can it reach harvesting size in as little as four days from flowering with proper maintenance, it quickly pollinates. If you don’t want a garden full of squash in a short amount of time, make sure to purchase either primarily male or primarily female blossoms.

Radishes could easily be the absolute simplest most reliable thing to grow. Getting radishes started are much easier than other crops too: simply sow seed directly into the soil. They grow very quickly and are ready in about two weeks. As you harvest a row, plant another and enjoy radishes all spring and summer long.

A member of the squash family, zucchini is one of those vegetables that will flourish without much help at all. The most time you’ll invest in this vegetable will be keeping it from overtaking your garden. Harvest your zucchini every day, and don’t let it grow very large.

You’ll have the easiest time growing cucumbers if you purchase seedlings from your local nursery. Though they grow above ground, cucumbers don’t require a lot of attention. Simply plant sticks your cucumber row for the crop to grow along, and watch them do their thing!

Many first-time gardeners do very well with their first harvest of carrots, giving the term ‘beginner’s luck’ meaning in the gardening world. You can avoid problems with rust flies and bacterial soft rot with crop rotation. Be sure not to plant your carrots in the same spot for more than two years in a row.

Most leafy greens are on the ‘easy’ list of home gardening, and spinach is no exception. You can sow spinach seedlings directly into the soil and make sure to keep the soil moist. Spinach takes 40-50 days to mature, but it’s easy to stagger your crop so you’ll have fresh greens all summer long.

Almost anyone can attest to the outrageous cost of herbs at grocery store, particularly organically grown herbs. Not only are flat leaf parsley seedlings much less expensive, your crop will sprout twice before you need to start fresh with new seedlings.

Green beans are both delicious and easy to grow. If you’re looking to go the easiest route, you can stick with bush types. However, if you want to make the most of your space, pole types give you more of your crop in the same amount of space. Provide sticks you’re pole green beans can climb up and you’ll have a very productive harvest.