How to Grow a Vegetable Garden

It’s a great idea to learn how to grow a vegetable garden if you want to have natural and organic food on your table.

And it's a very green thing to do – provided that you do it in a green way, of course!

So if you want healthier diet advice, grow your own vegetables and eat lots of them every day!

Scroll down towards the bottom of the page for links to lots of easy starter crops. They all have full instructions on sowing, planting and harvesting.

How to grow a vegetable garden:

Why is learning how to grow veg a green thing to do?

In short, because you are building your own health and vitality and you are helping support wildlife.

See here for a real home business opportunity Work at home on something you love - and get paid!

If you are producing some of your own food you are also reducing the food miles of your kitchen supplies. For the food you grow in your garden or yard that's zero food miles in fact!

("Food miles" is a measure of the distance a particular food item has travelled from the grower or place of origin to your table.)

If you learn how to grow a vegetable garden you are also helping to build soil fertility for plant and insect life and for future generations.

A well-run vegetable patch will benefit your local wildlife. For example, robins love to find worms as you dig the earth. Lots of birds, insects and animals benefit from an organic garden, directly and indirectly.

Picture below: An organic garden has lots of inhabitants, many of them beneficial, too. This lovely fellow turned up near some empty plant pots in a damp corner.

Take your time

How to grow a vegetable garden:

Growing some of your own vegetables and fruit is quite easy, but as with any skill there are lots of things to learn and if you dive straight in without advice the learning curve can be a bit steep and rocky.

Furthermore, you can waste your own time and money which is perhaps not very green at all. It is certainly frustrating!

So make sure that you have enough time to spare to make a success of it. While you do need to give it quite a lot of time, especially to begin with, once you get going you can usually fit it around your other activities.

One of the nicest things about growing some of your own veg is that it is a very relaxing and absorbing hobby. When you are working with soil and growing things time seems to slow down. Your thoughts tend to slow down too and you can enjoy a peaceful and calm interlude in an otherwise busy day.

However, you still need to be a bit organised:you need to follow growing instructions carefully and it’s a good idea to keep a notebook to record your plans and plantings. That way you have a record to learn from in future years.

So take your time with learning how to grow a vegetable garden - every year you will have more success.

So here's how to grow a vegetable garden...or at least, begin!

First, it's really important to think about your climate and soil! A little contemplation of these things can make a big difference to your success.

Climate and soil

How to grow a vegetable garden:

Start with easy projects if you are new to growing. All the suggestions below are suitable for growing anywhere with a Mediterranean-style climate or a cooler climate such as you find in England or Oregon. Make sure you take your local climate into account when you decide just what to grow.

If you are planting outside, check what type of soil you have. You might also want to check its Ph value. You can buy inexpensive soil testing kits in most garden centres. These measure how acid or alkaline the soil is.

Soil Ph can vary even within a few feet, though not usually by much. Normal Ph values range from 5 to 7.5. If your soil is within that range you should be able to grow most things.

The best Ph value for growing vegetables is about 6.5 to 7.

How to grow a vegetable garden: What to do if your soil is too acid?

Some soils are naturally very acidic. Some plants like acid conditions but most vegetables and garden plants don't. If your garden soil is a little bit too acid then you can apply garden lime when you prepare the soil. Most big garden centres stock lime. Don't add lime at the same time as fertilisers. Preferably add it when the beds are empty.

Buy quality seeds

How to grow a vegetable garden:

Buy good quality seed and use it while it is within the use by date. Some seed does not keep well (carrots in particular). I like to throw my old seed all together into a seed tray to see just what does come up. I often get usable plants but they are extras, not the main crop.

I think it is worth avoiding F1 seeds in the main. You can’t use them to provide seed crops for the next year because they don’t breed true. And they are often by-products of the horticultural industry which are bred for their uniformity and manageability with herbicides and pesticides. Having said that, many of them do crop reliably.

You can buy interesting varieties from many of the smaller organic seed suppliers and it is often quite easy to collect seed from the mature plants if you leave them to flower. This can save quite a bit on expenses, particularly once you start to get reasonably reliable results.

When learning how to grow a vegetable garden it's good to start with easy crops. Cultivation tips for the more difficult organic crops are beyond the scope of this website. There are lots of websites dedicated to gardening, horticulture and organic techniques.

I include some tips on how to grow a vegetable garden for common easy crops. This is because I believe that learning how to grow a vegetable garden is a good thing to do if you are interested in becoming a bit greener. If this route to greener living apeals to you, you will search out the finer points once you have got started!

Please see below for details of starter crops.

Easy starter crops

How to grow a vegetable garden:

One of the easiest things to grow is a cut-and-come again salad crop. You can do this in the soil of your garden or yard or you can use a large planter or window box.

Radishes have to be one of the very easiest of crops to grow. Children love growing these because the results are so quick.

Beetroot and Swiss Chard are both easy and nutritious and very rewarding to grow. Swiss chard will keep you in greens for most of the winter when other greens are scarse. Beetroot are quite easy to store for winter too.

The onion family has some very easy to grow members. Leeks are probably the easiest and chives and garlic are worth considering as easy and valuable herbs. Have a look at onions leeks and shallots

Herbs can be a great addition to a wildlife garden as well as being great for the kitchen. Here are some tips and cultivation notes for growing herbs indoors and out

Carrots are fairly easy, though carrot fly (an insect which burrows into the root) can be a bit tricky to avoid.

Parsnips are one of the easiest crops and are really very little trouble.

Potatoes are a breeze, provided you don’t mind a bit of spade work to earth them up as they grow. They can be grown in open ground, or more intensively in containers such as old tyres or barrels.

Peas are moderately easy to grow provided that you keep them covered with netting to begin with (pigeons love ‘em!) They are rather time consuming but the "mange tous" varieties are well worth the trouble and usually prove very popular.

There are many kinds of bean which really are a doddle. Runner beans need poles or nets to climb and so do some of the French beans (but not all). That said, they are some of the most trouble-free plants and very beautiful too. Broad beans in my book are a bit trickier but their amazing taste justifies the time and effort. They also freeze well.

Broad beans are worth it!

Cabbage family plants – cabbage, calabrese, sprouting broccoli, kale and cauliflower and others – are a bit harder in the main, particularly cauliflower. I’ve always found broccoli to be fairly easy provided that you protect them from the birds and keep a look out for pests.

I love growing growing tomatoes even though they are quite labour-intensive. They are just so tasty straight from the garden. If the weather is kind (if!) they are not really hard, just fiddly. There are also quite a lot of ways you can use them, such as making soups and chutneys.

Planting garlic for a good home supply Garlic is not especially difficult. This page gives basic cultivation tips.

Cucumbers are quite easy if you live in the right sort of area. They can be grown under cloches and in the greenhouse but if you can grow them outside without protection, so much the better. Time was you had only one main type available – the ridge cucumber – but now there are more varieties which can thrive outside.

Many salad crops such as lettuce and other vegetables can be grown in boxes and planters - See Designing a Container Garden

See here for some alternatives to lettuce. Many of these plants can be successfully grown in containers, too.

You can also consider growing some things in cold frames. Where I live, in sometimes windy and chilly East Anglia, it is a good idea to start most things off under cover.

For this a cold frame or a greenhouse is ideal but you can get by with windowsills and home-made cloches.

Picture above: An allotment or a greenhouse can be great assets if you want a successful vegetable garden - but neither are really necessary.

If you want to try your hand at growing natural and organic food and you haven’t done it before I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it can be.

So learn how to grow a vegetable garden – just follow the links for particular crops above. It is a bit addictive and you may even discover that you have green fingers!

If you already experienced in how to grow an organic vegetable garden I hope you will still find the odd useful tip that you can use to add to your success.

From How to grow a vegetable garden Back to Organic Gardening is Green Gardening.

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