The easiest way to lose the gardening bug permanently is to start a huge garden with a bunch of vegetable varieties suited only to an expert, then see everything disappear down insect gullets in a few months.  I recommend that beginning gardeners instead start small, with just a few vegetables that are nearly impossible to kill.  Here are my top contenders:

Leaf lettuce - The time has already passed for this cool season crop, but fall will be here before you know it.  Lettuce is great for beginners because you can't do anything wrong and you get to harvest a month after planting.  One of the easiest to grow in our area is Black-seeded Simpson, but I like to mix in a red variety for eye candy.  Read all of my tips on growing lettuce here.

Swiss chard - Most greens are extremely easy, but Swiss chard takes the cake.  Unlike other greens, swiss chard doesn't get bitter, nor does it bolt the first year.  The greens are mild in flavor and can be substituted in recipes which call for spinach (a vegetable that does bolt quite quickly.)  Although they taste the same as the white-stalked variety, urban gardeners will love Swiss chard varieties with leaf stalks ranging in color from white to yellow to red since they're pretty enough to mix into your flower border.  This warm season crop should be planted after your frost-free date --- for nearly all of you, that means you can go ahead and plant now.  Once the leaves are four inches tall, I start cutting them just like leaf lettuce once or twice a week, making sure I don't cut the growing bud, but taking most other leaves.

Tomatoes - In my opinion, tomatoes are really a year two crop, but the flavor difference between a homegrown tomato and a storebought one is so great that few people can resist planting them.  For the raw beginner, you should go ahead and buy a transplant or two from the feed store and put them out after the frost-free date.  Choose a slicer or a tommy-toe (or both).  Be sure to cage or stake your tomato, and if you're starting this year, I highly recommend pruning since the blight is still in the air.  In later years, I think you'll be happier starting your own tomatoes from seed and growing primarily romas for ease of storage, but in year one you should stick to simple vegetables that go straight on your plate.

Basil - I see people buy basil transplants, and I can't figure out why.  Basil is the easiest herb you can grow --- throw the seeds on the ground around your frost-free date and you'll be picking off leaves a couple of weeks later.  The trick to a summer-long harvest is to cut your basil back regularly (at least once a week) and never let it bloom.  With lettuce and swiss chard, I told you to be careful not to harvest the central growing bud, but with basil I advocate the reverse.  Cut the whole top off the plant, leaving one or two pairs of older leaves at the base, and it will branch out into a bush.  Keep cutting the youngest, tastiest leaves, and your plant will just get bigger and bushier.  When the basil does start trying to bloom, pick off the flower buds.  I recommend a simple Sweet Italian or Genovese basil for your first year, but later you can branch out into the varieties that taste great in other ethnic foods.

Sweet Corn - The only major thing that can go wrong with corn is lack of pollination if you plant too small of an area.  I try to plant at least two short rows together, and three or four are better.  Your corn will mature nearly all at once, so for a full summer harvest, I plant a bed on our frost-free date, and continue planting another bed every two weeks until the end of June.  Like tomatoes, there's no comparison between homegrown and storebought sweet corn.  But this is the one vegetable where I like to stick with fancy hybrids --- heirloom varieties are starchy instead of sweet.

Okra - Okra may seem like an odd choice for the beginner, but in the South few crops beat its ease of growth.  In fact, the plant has such huge, beautiful flowers that okra can easily pass for an ornamental.  Plant the seeds at the frost-free date, and in a couple of months you'll see blooms and little, furry fruits.  Cut the whole fruit off at the stem when it is less than three inches long and steam it --- the trick to defeating okra slime is to never let water touch the interior of the fruit.  We eat our steamed okra with our fingers, holding it by the stem and eating the fruit portion off, but you could cut the tops off after steaming them if you like.  The traditional method of eating okra is to slice, batter, and fry it, but I can't really recommend that approach.  Our favorite variety is Clemson Spineless.

The beginner should pick two to four of these varieties to try out their first year, steering clear of okra if you live in the north and of tomatoes if you live in a very hot area like Texas.  Plant a very small garden, no more than perhaps 100 feet square, and mulch the whole thing if possible to cut down on weeding.  If you have anther choice, steer clear of pots, which are harder than they look, and keep good records of when and where you planted and what happened.  Most of you still have time to start something this year, so go do it!

This post is part of our Beginner's Guide to Gardening and Eating in Season lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Gardening and eating in season can be daunting Six easy vegetables Simple recipes for simple vegetables In-season cooking experiments Resources for beginners

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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