Beginners Garden - Our 10 Best Crops for Beginner Gardening

If you are just getting started gardening, here's a few ideas to get you going successfully. You probably want something that's simple to plant, will mature fairly quickly, will tolerate marginal soil conditions, and a few ideas that may work even in containers.

Here's a list of some crops that most gardeners can grow. Almost all beginner gardeners want to start with tomatoes, even if it's just a hanging tomato planter, but they are heavy feeders and still need a fair amount of maintenance, and you still have to know when you need to be watering tomato plants, especially if you are growing in containers, and they don't handle frost, and don't do well in extremely hot summers either. Bottom line, there are vegetable crops that are easier and more productive to grow for the beginner. Here's a few suggestions.

1. Radishes - These are one of the easiest cool weather crops, they can handle a frost, and you are harvesting in a month. Growing radishes is a great way to get an early start, is often the first thing out of the garden, and can easily be grown in containers.

2) Lettuce - Specifically leaf lettuce, once again can handle some early frost, and the leaf lettuce spreads out the harvest over several weeks. With their shallow roots, growing lettuce works well in containers.

3) Onions - The nice thing about onions is that if you plant small plants, and you somehow don't get them to grow bulbs, you still have salad onions. Easy to grow, and if you try planting onion plants they can get off to a great start.

4) Swiss Chard - Great in cold weather and it takes hot summer days fairly well also. Can last through the summer even in Texas, and carry into a fall harvest. The greens are great cooked with butter.

5) Green Beans - They like it a little warmer, but you can plant either bush beans for a burst of beans at harvest time, or pole beans that climb more and stretch out the harvest. There is nothing in the grocery store that compares to garden fresh beans.

6) Sugar Snap Peas - Either the original Sugar Snap Peas, which are a climbing vine that needs support, or a bush variety like Sugar Daddy. These usually don't make it to the house, they are sweet enough to eat right off the vine. Kids love these.

7) Zucchini - Start with a bush variety, but these love the later spring days, and once they get started you'll have more zucchini than you know what to do with. Can have a few problems with squash vine borers, but planting early will help avoid those critters.

8) Peppers - Bell peppers, chili peppers, jalapeno peppers, there's a pepper for everyone. Peppers do well in warm, but not hot months. They actually like temperatures below 90 F, but you can keep them productive with an organic mulch to cool them in the extreme heat.

9) Potatoes - Grow them in soil or even in a straw bed. The tubers are straightforward to grow from seed potatoes, and if you can't wait for the final harvest nothing tastes like new potatoes from the garden.

10) Okra - This is a dark horse, and some don't really care for it. But it makes the list because there is nothing more impressive from a distance than a 5 foot tall freestanding okra plant. Likes the heat, and once it gets going you'll have more okra than you know what to do with.

Try one or more of these alternatives for your beginning garden, especially to get your kids interested in gardening, and you'll be impressed with just how good a gardener you can be.

Although cabbage is not on the "Top 10 List" we had phenomenal success with our winter crop of cabbage. It just sat there in the garden all fall and winter until this spring when it produced this beautiful head of cabbage.

The radishes were harvested in the late fall. Beautiful, aren't they?

The squash, zucchini, okra and green beans round out a great harvest!