New to gardening? 5 Beginner crops sure to succeed
New to gardening and don’t know where to begin?
Here are 5 easy crops to start with:
1. Lettuce: When you first start a garden, especially if you have only a small space, you want to grow those foods that taste DRASTICALLY better from your garden than from the store. Because it doesn’t store very long or travel very well, there is just nothing quite like lettuce straight from the garden. It’s also pretty hard to mess up. Plant it densely and you get to harvest baby lettuce. Give it more space and you get whole heads. Take a few leaves and come again, or harvest the whole head and plant again. It thrive in full-sun to part shade. One thing to remember is that most lettuce varieties prefer it cool and wet, so get an early start or grow fall lettuce. The lettuce will also product longer and stay more mild tasting if you pick it early and often.
2. Peas: Fresh from the garden peas are a harbinger of summer and bring a lot of people back to their childhood when their parents or grandparents had them eating peas straight from the garden. Fresh, never frozen peas are hard, if not impossible to find in the grocery store, and they’re so expensive. Peas germinate easily and are pretty forgiving of how deep they’re planted. If you don’t have a trellis, you can grow bush peas just as easily. Plant them early in the year and keep them watered well and you’ll be enjoying peas just like the old days. Not only are they easy to grow, its pretty easy eating them all up as well.
3. Tomatoes: Tomatoes are everyone’s favorite straight from the garden! And they’re a really good jumping off place for a first time garden. Perhaps the trickiest thing about tomatoes is getting them started. Most people choose to start tomatoes indoors before transplanting them outside. Tomatoes seedlings need an average of 8 hour of light a day to keep them from getting leggy. If not being grown in a greenhouse they require a very sunny south-facing window. Once they’re off and running, they transplant quite easily and can grow with or without support. It’s typically very easy to tell when they’re ripe by color and feel, and harvesting couldn’t be simpler.
4. Radishes: Radishes are the quickest garden vegetable you can grow and give you a fast feeling of success in your new garden. Plant them early and water them well and you’ll have mild tasting, juicy radishes that nothing in the grocery store can compare to.
5. Cucumber: Sweet and crunchy cucumbers are an amazing addition to salads, and sandwiches and make a great and filling snack all on their own. Because they can be direct sown and germinate easily, they make a great beginner crop. Plant them after all danger of frost has past in well drained soil. Water well and keep them picked and you will have more cucumbers than you know what to do with. Any excellent crop to share with friends and neighbors!
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