Vegetable Gardening for Beginners

[LouisFerdinand]

Planning a Vegetable Garden

 

[headfullofbees]

Would Beets be a good vegetable for the beginner gardener?

Yes & they're not too fussy about soil type.
What I'd do, is try to establish a number of features about your soil, the easy, cheap way.
Taste. Just taste your soil (you can spit it back out), if it's sweet it's likely to be good to go for most veg, if bitter, it's acid, & that will limit your choices this year, but you can raise the pH in winter, with lime or woodash.
Test how good your drainage is by digging a hole a foot deep & a foot in dia. & fill it with water.
If it runs away in minutes, but only if it runs away in minutes, think of this as a primer, as your soil may have been dry to start with.
Fill with water, if it runs away in minutes, you have light soil, in hours, med soil, a day or more, heavy soil.
This may also limit your choices; carrots don't do too well on heavy soil, but brassicas love it.
The good news about peppers, is that they are fairly adaptable to soil type, & if you get the climate that favours them, they can do very well.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Test how good your drainage is by digging a hole a foot deep & a foot in dia. & fill it with water.

I dug a hole like that on an uncultivated bit of the garden when a cat took to shitting on the lawn, within an hour it had filled with water
We have clay just under the surface where it hasn't been cultivated.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

They need cool temps and the seed needs to be sown very thinly, lightly covered, and must be kept damp all during germination without fail.

England, Cool and wet at the start of the year, that's why I don't have problems with them

 

[MiniOrchardDude]

What are the best vegetables to plant for beginners?

Part of gardening is learning from failures and mistakes and taking advantage of the successes. One year one thing might grow great and the next not so great. In my opinion the best thing to do is to plant as much variety that you have room for. Use that experience the following year to help decide what to grow again and what not to grow.

Fruit trees are a different story as they are perennials.

Have fun!

MOD

 

[emcas]

I think it all tends to be sort of relative ... for me I can't get any root veggies to grow as my soil is heavy clay. Even in containers after having mixed up a light soil with peat moss, perlite, compost, I cannot get carrots or beets. I get a lot of greens but that's it. The taproots never develop.

For me, tomatoes and peppers were the 'easiest' - my first year ... knowing nothing, my yields were insane. I'm still a beginner after 3 years but I will say that trial / error and keeping a journal seems to help me make better decisions going forward. Ironically or not, now that I have been educating myself I feel like my yields are worse. =)

I think the advice of growing what you want to eat and having fun are probably the best kernels of info one can be given. I hope it's been going well for you!

 

[LouisFerdinand]

How to start a Vegetable Garden

 

[walterbyrd]

The best vegetables to plant for beginners are cucumbers, raddish, lettuce, chillies, mint broccoli and tomatoes.

Be careful with mint. It grows faster than weeds. It will take over, and is hard to get rid of.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I can't get any root veggies to grow as my soil is heavy clay.

I live on Weald clay here, when I arrived five years ago it was just yellow and solid more than a few inches down most places. Of course I have been putting all sorts in to it, but the thing I have found helps most is saving the balls of clay I get when I hoe in the greenhouse so they dry out, and then burning them in the incinerator every time I have a fire. It makes a sort of coarse terracotta, mixed with ash, which I break up and return to the soil and use in mixed into pots. The thing is it gives double bubble, I am not just adding something to lighten the soil, I am also taking out the equivalent amount of clay, over five years it is beginning to make quite a difference.

 

[nemodot]

1. Potatoes
2. Any type of squash or cucumber (try zucchini, butternut, etc)
3. Chards
4. beets