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!
Garden vegetable plants have a secret double life that no one is talking about. Sure, homegrown veggies taste delicious in a yummy seasonal recipe. And yes, it feels good to supplement your grocery trip with some pesticide-free vegetables. But why is no one talking about the flowers?
Planting zone 9 and higher is hot. For gardeners, that means a long growing season. In fact, if you plan it right, you could grow vegetables almost all year long! That seems alright by me! As any gardener knows, though, some vegetables are a bit “particular” about where, when, and how they grow. Then there are those vegetables for hot, dry climates that don’t need much more from you than a hand getting into the ground.
One of the best things you can do for your kids is to help them start a business. Even a simple lemonade stand teaches them leadership skills, social skills, how to manage money, and boosts their self-esteem. This year a good friend of ours launched a kid’s entrepreneur fair. The idea was that kids would come up with a small business idea, and sell at their own booth.
I’ll do just about anything to keep pests out of my vegetable garden. I’d even use Home Alone-style booby traps if I thought they’d keep insects and other pests from devouring my veggies. But alas, swinging paint cans and hot irons are not the solutions. Trap crops, on the other hand, are more subtle than Kevin McAllister’s burglary deterrents.
I’m a barefoot gardener, and until I posted a video online of my daughter and me in the garden picking veggies for dinner, I never considered any issues with that. I prefer to be barefoot when outside as much as possible, so what could be wrong with going into the garden barefoot?
I’m going to say right up front that when I first came across the concept of no-dig gardening, I had visions of skipping through the meadow sprinkling seeds like fairy dust, while magic pixies followed behind with perfect drops of water for each seed. By the time imaginary me had reached the end of the field, flowers, vegetables, fruits, and herbs were all in full bloom behind me.
In theory, growing vegetables should be pretty easy. Put your seeds in the ground, water them, and a week later you have adorable little sprouts. 60 or so days later you’re sitting at your table enjoying a spinach salad, sweet summer squash, and planning to make pickles from your abundance of cucumbers.
There’s really not much that’s cooler than a kid’s vegetable garden. It combines all things fun and neat in the world, and you get to experience gardening through their eyes. Kids can get their hands dirty, they get to take care of something, and they get to see the payoff of their work —they get to eat it, too!
I’ve always felt that one of the joys of a garden is that moment when you walk outside and get some fresh herbs to cook with or when you see a few ripe tomatoes on the vine and decide you’ll make gazpacho for dinner. Exciting as that is, it can feel a bit overwhelming when you’re figuring out where to begin. I’ve been tending a small kitchen garden right outside my back door for a few years now, but it would have been helpful in the beginning if someone had told me the best herbs and veggies to plant, so I didn’t go planting watermelons with my herbs the first year.
As much as I love to read, sometimes a printable companion planting chart is a better option. Scientifically speaking, you only need to see something for 13 milliseconds for your brain to recognize it, according to an MIT study. Not that gardening is about speed, because it’s not. You can’t hurry nature. You can’t hurry love, either, if you believe Diana Ross and the Supremes, but that’s a topic for another blog.
