Vegetable gardening is a great way to bring fresh vegetables into your home and there is nothing quite like biting into a ripe tomato that you just plucked from the garden. Cutting lettuce and kale for tonight’s dinner just minutes before it is served ensures that the veggies on your dinner table haven’t lost any of their nutrients in transit. Growing vegetables can also be a source of relaxation and bonding event for your family. Here are the 10 Most Popular Veggies to Grow in your backyard.
- Tomatoes are the number one grown vegetable in the world in both large backyard gardens to small patio container gardens. There are hundreds of varieties to choose from including the yellow pear tomatoes that are excellent in salads to Better Boy and large Heirloom tomatoes like Brandywine. If you love to make your own homemade sauces, don’t forget to plant Roma Tomatoes.
- Cucumbers are another favorite as one plant produces a lot of cukes! Cucumbers are a heat-loving plant and can be either sown directly into the garden after all dangers of frost or you can plant transplants too. These are easy vegetables to grow from seed.
- Pumpkins are super popular to grow in the middle of the summer. All squash plants prefer the heat of summer and you can find over a hundred different varieties to grow including small sugar pumpkins to large ones perfect for carving. They take a lot of space and water and will send out a lot of vines. Make sure to give them a lot of nutrients as the pumpkins are growing too.
- Green Beans love warmer weather and pole beans grow beautifully up a trellis and bush beans make a great shrub plant. They are often planted next to corn so the corn is the green beans’ trellis. Green beans are a great vegetable to can and also to freeze when picked fresh.
- Peas prefer to grow in cooler weather and can be sowed in early spring or summer. Plant them next to a fence or around a trellis as they need the support. Peas have beautiful flowers that attract butterflies and bees to the garden before they set out their pea pods.
- Broccoli is a very popular cool season crop and needs to be spaced at least 12” from other plants as they can grow a large crown. You can harvest the florets as they shoot up or wait until the broccoli has formed the crown and then cut that off. If you harvest the florets, it will continue to send them up throughout its growing season.
- Carrots grow very well in the cool season and are super easy as you can just toss the seeds in an area, and then once the plants start to grow, thin out so that they are 2” apart. Harvest the sweet and crunchy root vegetable when the carrot’s shoulders push up out of the ground.
- Spinach is great to grow year round, even though they prefer it a little cooler. Sprinkle seeds on an area in your garden and in a week you can harvest baby spinach. Sow new seeds every week so you continually have new leaves to harvest.
- Lettuce is popular to grow because of how easy it is. Growing leaf lettuces is down similarly to spinach and kale. Both leaf and head lettuces grow best in the cool season, but you can grow loose leaf year round. Sow different types of loose leaf lettuce seeds together to create your own spring mix.
- Kale has quickly become one the of the most popular vegetables to grow because it can be pricey in the grocery store. It is also a cool season crop that grows well with spinach and loose leaf lettuces. As it grows, harvest the outer leaves to enjoy baby kale in your salad all week long. In warmer areas, water it well and give it partial shade to get it to grow year round.
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