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!
The world of health sciences can be tough to keep up with. Is the bottle of red wine good or bad for you? That may depend on which research study you read. But one thing that’s pretty unanimous in the world of health is that you can get a lot of benefits by growing vegetables at home.
We all know that some of the joy of gardening is just being outdoors or getting some dirt under our nails. But let’s not kid ourselves, either. We also know that harvesting and enjoying that fresh produce is a big part of the fun.
Ever go to the beach? The sun feels blissful. It’s bright and hot enough that it coerces you into the cold ocean waters. Then, after an hour or so, it gets unpleasantly hot. You wish you had the foresight to bring a beach umbrella. Instead, you’re just cooking because your friends aren’t ready to leave, but you also don’t feel like getting tossed around in the waves anymore. So you end up seeing how small you can get to fit your whole body under your beach towel.
If you’re a word nerd, you might appreciate that the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “heirloom” as “something of special value handed down from one generation to another.” They also define it as a plant “that has survived for several generations usually due to the efforts of private individuals.” If that doesn’t make an heirloom garden sound special, I don’t know what does.
There are a lot of ways to grow a successful garden. Companion planting is one of the best “next level” strategies to help with that goal. Companion plants are like your friend who encourages you to exercise and eat healthy. You can certainly figure out how to do that on your own. And you may even have what you need – fruit in the refrigerator, good walking shoes, and that exercise app that you downloaded months ago. But it’s amazingly helpful to have that one really annoying, er, helpful friend who cheers you on and holds you accountable.
Plenty of vegetables out there love the sun. They could spend the day at the beach just lying on the sand and watching the waves. Other herb and vegetable plants? Not so much. They’re more the beach umbrella type; they like a little plant shading.
If you could step into a time machine and go back a few generations, you’d have a heck of a time trying to find organic vegetables at the supermarket. Why? No one was growing organic vegetables. There was no such thing. People just grew gardens. It was as simple as that.
If you think planting vegetables at home will be hard, try planting vegetables on Mars. In the 2015 movie, The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is assumed lost and dead after a storm. His crew leaves the planet, and he is stuck with a diminishing food supply and the possibility of living on Mars for years before there is any chance of rescue. Naturally, he decides to grow a garden. It makes sense in the movie, but I don’t want to give too much away.
I’ll admit that here in New England, it’s a little hard in the bite of the winter to think about preparing a garden for spring. It’s the time of year when many of us are starting to hunker down with our hot chocolates in front of the fireplace. Going outside is fine if you want to take a winter hike or hit the ski slopes. But gardening? Not so much.
Winter means something different if you live in New England than if you live in southern California. But no matter where you live, when the temperature drops, your outside plants could use a little extra care if they’re going to survive. Covering plants for winter isn’t all that challenging, generally, but there are some pretty common mistakes that will leave you with a garden full of dead stalks and stems.
