As you choose what to plant in your vegetable garden, you’ll need to consider several things. The main factors to think about are:
- What you like to eat (and how much of it, and when)
- What grows well in your local climate
- What will growi n your specific conditions
- What’s most worthwhile to grow at home
What You Like to Eat
Obviously, there’s no point growing vegetables or fruit that you and your family won’t eat! Even though radishes are quick and easy, if your family doesn’t like them, don’t grow them.
Consider, too, how much of something you can eat before it goes past its best, especially if it can’t be stored. Salad greens are a good example. Things like lettuce and spinach can and should be planted multiple times in small batches to give you a new supply every few weeks.
What Grows Well in Your Climate
There are several things to consider here: temperatures, water, and length of growing season.
Temperature: some crops need a certain amount of heat or cold to succeed and unless you can give it to them it’s a waste of time and space to grow them. You can increase heat available to some extent using a greenhouse or other covering techniques, and cool things down a bit using shade, but there’s a limit to what can be done.
Rainfall / Water available: How much water do your plants have available, as natural rainfall or irrigation (city water, stored rainwater or well/lake/pond water)? Intensive growing beds need extra water applied in most climates in order to produce well. If you have little water available for irrigation, you can choose less water-hungry plants, space them far apart to give them a larger area of soil water to draw on, use mulch, use sunken beds or basins to hold water, or even use netting to catch mist.
Length of Season: non-hardy food plants need frost-free weather to grow, so the length of time between your average last frost date in spring and average first frost date in fall is critical. Vegetable growing books and seed catalogs often give “days to maturity” which you can compare with your growing season length. You may be able to extend the growing season earlier in spring and later in fall using row covers, cloches, tunnels, cold frames, greenhouses etc.
What Will Grow in Your Conditions
As well as the general climate in your area, the specific place you plan to grow in has conditions which will affect what you can grow and how much. These conditions include:
- Containers or in-ground
- size of area (start small!)
- hours of sunshine / shading
- vertical space (trellising increases what you can grow in a small space)
- windiness (you may need a windbreak, screens, or stakes)
- your growing skill
- soil quality and pH
Let’s look at some examples of how your conditions will affect your choices.
Tomatoes
- What kind do you like to eat? Cherry, beefsteak, roma, low acid, unusual colors?
- Do you want to save seed? Then you need non-hybrids
- Are they to eat fresh in salads or sandwiches, make sauce with, can, freeze, or dry?
- Do you need varieties which do well in heat (many kinds stop setting fruit over a certain temperature) or cool temps (many will never ripen if it’s too cool)
- Do you have a short season? Pick varieties with a low days-to-maturity and start them indoors
You can get tomato varieties which will grow into plants of any size from 8″ tall bushes for small pots, to 12′ tall vines which need sturdy trellises, stakes or cages. Tomatoes are supposed to need at least 6 hours of sun a day – but I’ve grown them on an East-facing patio where they got less than that and still produced some fruit.
Peas
- What kind? Traditional shelling peas, snow (sugar) peas, snap peas, or peas to be dried for soup?
- Climbing peas or bushes: you can get anything from 18″ tall to 8 feet and up.
- There are no hybrid peas, and they almost never cross varieties naturally, so you can save seed very easily.
- Some kinds are meant to come ripe all at once for freezing or canning batches. Others crop for several weeks to give you a steady flow for the table.
- Peas like cool weather so they are great to plant early (and will even overwinter in some climates). They crop in the summer. For later planted peas you can give them a shady area to protect from heat. Starting peas in midsummer to crop in the fall is more difficult, but can be done.
How Much to Grow
To start with, it makes more sense just to grow stuff and see what happens under your conditions. Once you have some idea, then you can predict how much you need to plant to get a certain harvest amount at a certain time, for fresh eating and to store. There are some books and sites which give yield figures, but to be honest the ranges are so wide, and the possible growing conditions so various, that they are not very useful.
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