The 10 Easiest Vegetables to Grow In Your Garden From Seeds

[digitS']

Easy(est)? I suppose those are right. But, you are already seeing with several responses that they are not ALL easy for every gardener.

"ready to get started. Which of the above veggies are you already growing in your garden?" Zero. Unless you might refer to any veggies or at any time and anyplace, there are only garlic and a few Kale plants (not growing yet) outside of protective growing in the backyard. Inside the protection of the temporary hoop house there are lots of Asian vegetables and the Kale is growing in beds in that environment. Inside the greenhouse, there are all sorts of veggies growing and becoming ready for transplanting!

Today may be a day when I can open the protective structures to the outdoors and venture out into the distant garden for a few hours. That should mean that there is a chance for the Peas to be planted - from seed. Ah yes, that's about 2 weeks late but that is how things happened this very cool spring, in this location. The Peas usually do fine and there will be Shell Peas, Snap Peas and Snow Peas. Last year, the flea beetles set them back some and the record-breaking HOT temperatures of June put a stop to any bounty. They are usually brought down by Summer heat and mildew but not until a good harvest.

Flea beetles can be devastating to Radish - one of your "easiest." Last year, I had a Radish variety developed especially for the harvesting of the leaves. No need to even wait for the roots to fully develop. Those plants bolted early and a late planting bolted quickly, as well - so, I joined @seedcorn with those difficulties.

Lettuce may also have problems with heat in the early weeks of the growing season. However, my biggest problem with Lettuce plants has been pests of the 4-legged and winged types. Rabbits will really enjoy Lettuce but House Sparrows have been a tremendous problem here in the backyard - about 25 feet from the neighbor's bird feeder filled with millet seeds. One of the worst Lettuce season in a different garden was when a family of pheasants showed up. They ate the entire crop.

Rabbits also like young Bean plants but if the Beans can just have a few weeks of peace, they can reach a stage when they aren't quite as attractive to Benjamin Bunny. A second harvest of Bush Beans is very possible but doesn't always happen because of rust disease and spider mites.

In this semi-arid climate, Carrot seed often has difficulties getting started. The seed is characteristically slow to germinate and has to be very close to the soil surface. One must be attentive to soil moisture conditions OR, cover the soil & seed with a board and then be attentive to removing the board as soon as the seedlings emerge.

Rabbits (or Something!) also like cucumber seed sprouts. With a backyard greenhouse, both Cucumbers and Squash are started and then transplanted - but, @TEG Project Manager was talking about direct-sown seed in the garden. Still, it would take little effort and not much more than a South Window to start Cucumbers and Squash and allow them to grow for all of about 3 weeks. Some of that time, they could be outdoors on nice days.

Beets and Chard are very similar plants but beets do require thinning. That's fine with me because those small plants are what I especially like to have at the table . Maybe we were not being asked to talk about problems but I don't have too many problems with Beets and Chard. But then, I live less than 100 miles from where Sugar Beets are grown on many acres, commercially.

No mention of Sweet Corn as an easy crop, direct-seeded?

Steve

 

[Phaedra]

What Steve said reminds me of a pest here in the springtime - the common blackbirds (Turdus merula).

They are lovely and sing well; however, they will destroy any unprotected bed as they want to find their food - insects or larvae. Many leafy greens can be pretty frost-hardy, but they can't survive once blackbirds dig in the beds.

So, I still need to cover the beds most of the time. Frost, blackbirds, hails, flea beetles, and then cabbage butterflies. Brassica family vegetables need, in my opinion, very intensive care before October in my climate.

 

[Cosmo spring garden]

when i first started gardening here it took me a few years to get the garden soil improved enough that it would grow decent beets. beets take some time to get going and need to be kept fairly uniformly damp. they're more like onions that ways. because of that requirement they also don't seem to start as well if you plant them too shallow or in heavier soils. pretty much you want a good loam and not as much clay as we have...

i could tell i was making progress as the leaves were getting better and better quality after a few years. the first year the leaves looked so bad i didn't even want to eat them.

Thank you for the encouragement. I started beets in soil blocks this year and transplanted them. Most have survived and are growing so I hope I get a harvest. Beets taste like dirt to me but my son and FIL love them so I want to grow for them.

 

[flowerbug]

Thank you for the encouragement. I started beets in soil blocks this year and transplanted them. Most have survived and are growing so I hope I get a harvest. Beets taste like dirt to me but my son and FIL love them so I want to grow for them.

they taste like dirt to me too but i still love them. they're not quite as gritty and grindy as dirt.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Depending on how you look at it, garlic is either very easy to grow or very hard. It's easy in the sense that you really don't have to DO much to keep it going, you just put the bulbs in the ground and that's pretty much it. Some soils and soil additions are GOOD for garlic, but none seem ESSENTIAL. And it does a pretty good job of protecting itself from pests (since most nibbling animals don't like it.)

What makes it HARD is adjusting to the concept of a crop whose proper growing cycle is MORE than one year. You CAN harvest you garlic at year's end, but depending on what kind you planted, you're only going to get small heads that way, or else "rounds". To get big heads, you usually need to leaving it in the ground for a few years. And that is sort of a challenge for me, who is used to re-designing my garden every spring, and can barely REMEMBER where anything was the year before.

And yes, I know that garlic cloves are technically not a "seed" but you get the idea.

 

[flowerbug]

Depending on how you look at it, garlic is either very easy to grow or very hard. It's easy in the sense that you really don't have to DO much to keep it going, you just put the bulbs in the ground and that's pretty much it. Some soils and soil additions are GOOD for garlic, but none seem ESSENTIAL. And it does a pretty good job of protecting itself from pests (since most nibbling animals don't like it.)

What makes it HARD is adjusting to the concept of a crop whose proper growing cycle is MORE than one year. You CAN harvest you garlic at year's end, but depending on what kind you planted, you're only going to get small heads that way, or else "rounds". To get big heads, you usually need to leaving it in the ground for a few years. And that is sort of a challenge for me, who is used to re-designing my garden every spring, and can barely REMEMBER where anything was the year before.

And yes, I know that garlic cloves are technically not a "seed" but you get the idea.

the biggest bulbs of garlic are grown from the biggest cloves. lifting the garlic and replanting those larger cloves each season is how it works for me. storage and eating of garlic is not too bad. you can process later sprouting garlic or use it up. all good. green garlic and the smaller cloves you don't replant are all useful. i've found little utility in removing the scapes off the top but if you don't need them for giving away or increasing it is probably better to remove them while they're still tender and enjoy them in some stir fries.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

the biggest bulbs of garlic are grown from the biggest cloves. lifting the garlic and replanting those larger cloves each season is how it works for me. storage and eating of garlic is not too bad. you can process later sprouting garlic or use it up. all good. green garlic and the smaller cloves you don't replant are all useful. i've found little utility in removing the scapes off the top but if you don't need them for giving away or increasing it is probably better to remove them while they're still tender and enjoy them in some stir fries.

I've begun to wonder if different kinds of garlic also have different "split points", that is, the size the bulb has to get to in order to divide into multiple cloves as opposed to a "round". I have certainly SEEN rounds that are the size of a full sized head of garlic (which presumably have a fairly large split point). On the other end, I used to have a garlic that was more or less useless for cooking because it would do an EXTREME split (as in divide up into about 16 cloves) when it was still the size of an olive (for a while, I lent a head to my sister to put on the kitchen counter of her dollhouse because it was the right scale!). In fact, the extremely early split was a big reason it eventually died out, it ended up dividing into cloves SO small that they didn't have enough stored food to make it through the winter and they all dried up and died.

 

[flowerbug]

I've begun to wonder if different kinds of garlic also have different "split points", that is, the size the bulb has to get to in order to divide into multiple cloves as opposed to a "round". I have certainly SEEN rounds that are the size of a full sized head of garlic (which presumably have a fairly large split point). On the other end, I used to have a garlic that was more or less useless for cooking because it would do an EXTREME split (as in divide up into about 16 cloves) when it was still the size of an olive (for a while, I lent a head to my sister to put on the kitchen counter of her dollhouse because it was the right scale!). In fact, the extremely early split was a big reason it eventually died out, it ended up dividing into cloves SO small that they didn't have enough stored food to make it through the winter and they all dried up and died.

it is for sure based upon variety of garlic as i've seen the same sort of thing.

i no longer grow multiple types of garlic here since i do want to keep the type i have growing unique to the variety as it was passed along to me.

 

[ducks4you]

Carrots can be disappointing. I am starting mine INSIDE, on my porch, until they are big enough to not have the seeds picked off by birds, and so that they don't fork on me...although I like to Eat carrots with a fork.

 

[digitS']

I was out prepping a bed for carrots today, @ducks4you . DW put the seed in the furrows - pelleted seed. Those pellets make germination so much more likely!

If we have drifted into garlic sets, why not onion sets . Real simple and harvest green in just a few weeks.

"Seed" potatoes? I think that term "lazy beds" was a put-down of subsistence farmers who worked like crazy to move soil and fertilizer. Still, if you can keep the rodents out of them, potatoes can be grown under old hay.

Back to the allium: I have found shallots from seed or sets to be generally pest free. Like their relatives, they like fertile ground and zero weed competition but it's kinda, plant-&-forget them until harvest. And, I'm a shallot fan .

Steve