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Below are a list of my favorite tips for growing your vegetables.  I wish I had known all these when I was first starting my garden plot!

 

Tomatoes

They need a rich soil or feeding.

Remember they are a sun loving plant so they will only do well if not shaded out.

Water once a week, (or twice in drought) but water heavily and deeply to encourage root growth.

If saving seeds, remember that tomatoes cross-pollinate readily, so saved seeds will not usually be true to type if growing a mixture of varieties.

Cucumber

These guys LOVE water.

Once you have fruit setting, I water with a drip feeder almost continuously.

Experiment with different varieties as characteristics vary wildly.

 

Radish

One of the easiest, quickest produce types to grow.

Don’t waste space growing them in their own rows, rather use them as row markers to grown while other seeds are germinating and sprouting.

Unless you like them particularly hot (and stringy too sometimes) avoid growing in the full summer, here I tend to plant them after Oct 1st

 

Leeks

Seedlings are far easier to grow than seeds, although once established very easy to grow.

Earth up or use tubes to extend the white portion as they grow.

 

Cabbage

Another plant that

is easier to grow from seedlings in my experience, as they need lots of protection from pests.

Cover over with a net as soon as you start seeing butterflies.

Sweetcorn

As soon as sweetcorn is picked the sugars start turning to starch.  This is one that is certainly better if cooked straight from the garden!

 

Carrots

The most difficult part of growing carrots from seed is separating the seeds, they are so tiny.  Be prepared to have some patience, and don’t worry if a few seeds fall into one space, just thin and eat as baby carrots as they grow.

I like to use a big dibber and make a deep carrot shape hole in the ground, then fill with compost, and plant my seed into that.  The root will take the shape of the form you have made!

 

Peas

Cover with plastic bottles when starting seedlings to keep the birds from eating the seeds.

 

Beans

Protect the same as peas.

Check your variety, some will require something to climb, other bush varieties will not.

 

Potatoes

I highly recommend the no dig method of growing potatoes.

Simply layer your ground with a generous coating of compost and plant into that.  Your tubers will form in the compost and not require the back-breaking digging traditionally required to remove them.

You can use the potatoes that ‘go over’ from your kitchen, in place of buying seed potatoes.

 

Garlic

Garlic gives you the opportunity to be planting something when everything else is already overwintering or farrow.  Another ridiculously easy crop.

Also the easiest plant in the world to seed save, just select the best size cloves from your best size bulbs as next year’s seed stock.

You can use supermarket garlic as your first set of seeds!

 

Turnip

Another very easy crop much like radish.

If your family isn’t into turnips, and they don’t get the best press, then harvest them when they are the size of golf balls, and bake them whole.

 

Beetroot

My secret here is this; Beetroot is way better than you remember it!  We have it sliced fine and raw in salads, and diced and baked as a dinner vegetable, everyone loves it, and it’s another exceptionally easy to grow crop.

 

Courgette

OK, Courgette is so crazily productive, its actually hilarious! We grow 5 plants a year and that produces more than my family can eat, even with saving some by making chutneys, dehydrating and freezing.  We even sell them when in season from our mini roadside farm shop, and we never run out.

 

Runner beans

Pick them before they get too big or they become stringy and unpalatable. About the size of a whiteboard marker.

You can string, chop and freeze these without blanching which is a bonus.

 

Broad beans

Another very easy to grow crop, but pick and pod while still small, when the individual beans are the size of your fingernails, not your thumbnails as they are so much more tender.  Larger beans tend to develop a chewy shell.

These can be dehydrated easily for simple storage.

 

Kale

Susceptible to the same pests as cabbage, but as they don’t form heads the damage is less devastating so these can be protected by vigilant pest picking.

 

 

The starting point when choosing which plants to grow is with your shopping list.  Which vegetables are you already buying regularly?  These are the ones your family is already eating right?

 

So, start with a list of what you already go through plenty of.  In our case there were three main types, they were salads, main meal vegetables (Think roast beef dinner), and then there were cooking ingredients and carbs.

 

For the sake of this article, I am purely looking at our annual vegetable beds.  For perennial vegetables such as asparagus check out our articles on perennial vegetables or the individual vegetables pages.

 

I knew we needed salad, so some leafy green salad vegetables were a necessity, along with tomatoes, cucumbers etc to make that leaf into a salad on a plate.  For main meal vegetables, we eat a lot of broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, cabbage, sweetcorn, carrots, peas and beans.  Finally, the things we used allot of for either carbs or as cooking ingredients, these were bell peppers, garlic, onion and of course potatoes.

Here’s how my list looked at this point –

 

Salad greens; mixed lettuce, spinach

Tomatoes

Cucumber

Radish

Spring onions

Broccoli

Cauliflower

Leeks

Cabbage

Sweetcorn

Carrots

Peas

Beans

Potatoes

Onion

Garlic

Bell peppers

 

 

The next list was aimed all at production.  I trawled many pages of my books, and the internet and produced a list of plants that were super productive or just plain easy to grow.  I feel it’s very important when starting out to make sure you have as much success as possible, so even if I had many failures, there were some plants I could bank on giving me results.

 

The list I suggest of high yield/work/skill ratio looked like this –

 

Potatoes,

Tomatoes,

Turnip,

Radish,

Courgette,

Runner beans,

Broad beans,

Kale,

Garlic,

French beans

 

As a completist, I had to try all of these from both lists, but I suggest you now merge these two lists (Which may well be different according to your family’s eating habits and your climate and conditions).  Anything that is on both lists is a no-brainer for you to grow.  All the things that are on one list but not the other is a judgement call based on your aversion to failure, and the time you have.

 

I have had real success every time from everything in the second list; In the south of the UK where I am, these have all consistently given me huge yields compared to the effort involved in growing them.  My success with items not on this list has been variable, although still very worthwhile.  If you are finding a particular type of vegetable from your first list daunting, remember; you don’t need to cultivate from seed every time.  Your success rates will dramatically increase by buying seedlings and transplanting them instead of germinating your own seeds.

 

The other factor when choosing your vegetables is the amount of space and time you have available.  Once you have planned out your space, you may wish to swap out some of your original choices.  Always remember though that things you know your family readily eat should always take priority.