Vegetable gardening is nutritious in both body and mind. It’s exciting to watch a little seed turn into a sprout, then into a small plant, and eventually, into a big ole squash plant that’s bursting with bright yellow gourds and giant green leaves. Digging your hands into cool soil is meditative. Smelling the basil and dill is heavenly. And you don’t have to live on a country estate to grow your own food at home, either.
City dwellers can plant vegetables in patio container gardens. In cold climates, you can start a small garden indoors or even grow vegetables outdoors most of the year if you have a greenhouse.
When it comes to planning a backyard vegetable garden, ideas are easy to come by. There are plenty of pictures of elaborate gardens with rows of sun-ripened tomatoes, entire sections devoted solely to peas, raised beds for root vegetables, and, of course, a fountain and seating area. We don’t all have gigantic yards, though. As nice as it would be to have row after row of heirloom tomatoes and cucumbers, it’s just not realistic when your backyard garden is a two-foot by four-foot rectangle between your driveway and the foundation of your house.
The thing is, you can create a really nice garden in that small rectangle of space. It’s a simple matter of timing, design, and plant selection. But if you have a large backyard, even better!
In the articles below, we dive into everything you need to know about vegetable gardening. You can learn even more in our How to Grow a Vegetable Garden: 10 Things Every Gardener Needs to Know Before Starting a Food Garden freebie. Enjoy!
As a kid, my least favorite flower was the marigold. Companion plants, pollinators, and wondering how the heck to keep rabbits out of my garden was still years away. Marigolds, on the other hand, were right there in front of me. So was the bee that stung me, along with a few of his fellow bees gathering pollen from the flowers. In my eight-year-old mind it was all connected: marigolds attract bees, bees sting you, therefore, marigolds were the worst flower ever.
If time machines were a thing, you could go back to a classic 1972 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial, where in the commercial, a man trips and falls, accidentally dipping his chocolate bar into a jar of peanut butter that a boy is eating from. After the initial disappointment, they both discover that chocolate and peanut butter are “two great tastes that taste great together.” You can’t plant Reese’s Cups, but if you want two garden plants that taste great together, try basil and tomato companion planting. It’s a Caprese salad right in your garden!
Editor’s note: This is our annually updated list of the best blueberries to grow, based on ratings from the Burpee website. Since last year, we’ve made some changes to reflect new ratings and reviews. Some blueberries have moved up in the ratings, some have moved down, and a few are holding steady. A few blueberries […]
Is there any flower more lovely than the sunflower? Famous post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh painted a series of sunflower canvases. It appears on the state flag of Kansas. There’s even a National Sunflower Association, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the agricultural importance of these flowers.
What do Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Gilroy, California; Miami, Florida; and Springfield, Ohio, have in common? These locations, along with more than 75 others, are the testing grounds for varieties of new vegetables, flowers, and herbaceous perennials that will become All-America Selections. AAS is a non-profit organization that tests new varieties of plants for “garden performance” all […]
Vertical gardening is very trendy these days, but I think it’s for good reason. Vegetable vines are great for growing “up,” and can be ideal for small gardens and containers. In fact, one of my city-dwelling friends manages to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and pole beans in a few large pots on the front porch. When I learned I could grow squash vertically around an arch trellis instead of, basically, everywhere they want to go, my life was forever changed.
I remember being in third grade and my teacher separated two of the annoying boisterous kids (okay, one of them was me), and said: “You two just can’t be around each other!” We were constantly distracting others and getting into trouble. Well, not unlike a couple of disruptive 8-year olds, there are vegetables that should not be planted together.
Seed catalogs can sometimes be so beautiful that they look like collector’s pieces, and even though they do quite literally expire in use each year, it’s hard to throw them out. When I start getting my seed catalogs in the mail in January, I take to them like a good book and sit down with […]
Nice as it would be, we don’t all have big plots of land and healthy, rich soil to grow our gardens. Heck, some of us don’t have any land at all, so we stick to container gardens on the balcony or front porch. Even though that may seem limiting, there are a lot of shallow root vegetables that work in containers or those tough spots that don’t seem useful for growing anything.
Sometimes, gardening advice gets passed around like gossip. It could be gardening tips from your grandfather on your mother’s side or a neighbor’s anecdotal vegetable garden evidence. It’s easy to hear something a few times, begin to believe it, and then adopt it into your own gardening practice. Here are some gardening myths that I’ve heard passed around and how they are based on misinformation or outdated methods.
