Three Easy-Peasy Vegetable Plants to Grow

It’s that time of year again/finally… Planting Time! I dream of it all winter, impatiently waiting for snow to melt and then bam, it sneaks up on me.

No matter where you are on the gardening continuum, there is always more to learn about the basics. And there is a way for you to grow some of your own food this summer. One potted tomato plant can bring pollinators, joy, and flavor to your home. Let’s get started, shall we?

Cold crops, like radish, spinach, and cabbage were seeded in weeks ago, but this weekend (OK, officially Monday, May 15) is when us Minnesota Zone 3b/4a gardeners get the green light for planting out our plots with the seeds and seedlings too touchy to handle frost. And Mother’s Day lines up perfectly with this timing 🙂

Small garden space? You’d never believe how much food can come from a 4X4 foot space until you try!

No garden space? Many vegetables can be grown in pots too!

Here are the three easiest vegetable plants to grow, with their fabulously funky variations, to get you started eating from your yard, deck, patio, or hanging basket all summer long. And the best news, these foolproof vegetables are still some of my favorites!

Growing Tomatoes

From sweet little cherry poppers to beefsteak whoppers there is a tomato for your every food mood. These fruits are always a garden favorite and for good reason; there’s something deeply satisfying about picking a sun warmed ripe tomato and popping it into your mouth. Home grown tomatoes are so much tastier than their store bought styrofoam copies that it is like eating a different veggie.

To be fair, I just found some Bushel Boy locally grown tomatoes (Southern MN) that were many steps closer to a real tomato.  Go local greenhouses! I agree with Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, Inc. in his belief that the best use of petroleum products is polyethylene reinforced plastic to cover and make greenhouses to extend the growing season.

Back to the varieties. An online search for tomato seeds at my favorite go-to seed company, Jung Seed,  came up with 71 seed varieties. I love how Mother Nature diversifies.

There are varieties best for eating, slicing, canning, or salsa. Then there are the colors. With names like Chocolate sprinkles, Lemon Boy and Midnight Snack you can dream for days. But dream time is over people, time to get planting. And sadly, we are now too late for starting tomato seeds. So, if you’re looking to get tomatoes in and enjoy them before September, gotta go buy some plants.

But first, know your options!

I would start by looking at the days to maturity and get a few different kinds. The ‘extra early’ varieties can be ready in 45 days. The late bloomers (ha), like paste tomatoes, can take up to 85 days to reach full maturity.

Tiny cherry tomatoes generally ripen quicker than the big behemoths. Like the Beefmaster Hybrid, which gives you an average TWO POUND tomato. That’s a party’s worth of salsa from two tomatoes.

Ever wonder why some tomatoes keep growing new shoots off the tops until the frost wilts them and some get big and bushy? There are two separate categories of tomato plants: Determinate and Indeterminate.

Determinate varieties are better for containers because they stop their shoot production once flowers form on the ends. Shorter plants = less staking (although a tomato cage is still a very good idea) and earlier ripening.

Indeterminate are the kind that vine up, up and away. These guys will keep pumping out flowers and fruits along their side shoots until a frost knocks them down. They grow taller and require more care in general. Like pruning, which helps the plant know where to deliver its power and grow more tomatoes.

Read between my lines: first timers, try a determinate variety first. The labels should say which type they are; if not, ask someone, or google it quick while no one is looking…like I did and found this awesome article.

After setting the plants into some happy compost/soil, keep watered and watch for pests. Before I had copious amounts of compost, I found good luck with this fish fertilizer, although my husband wants me to find something else because, you guessed it, the smell. Oddly, this stuff smelled minty to mask the other odors. The smells never bothered me, but I’m the one who cleans the chicken coop. I digress.

Harvesting: In case you have any tomatoes that make it inside from the garden and can’t bear the idea of the fruits of your labor going to waste, it is time to preserve them. This can be as easy as slicing in half and freezing on a sheet pan and then popping into a freezer bag, or as fun as canning homemade spaghetti sauce.

Growing Green (and other colored) Beans

Beans are another one of the easiest vegetable plants to grow. There are two main options with beans. Short little bush beans, or lanky pole beans.

*I just caught a similarity here between tomatoes and beans that I’d never noticed before, they both have short bushy and long vining varieties, cool (beans).

Beans are so versatile—you can eat them raw right from the garden or cook them roughly a thousand different ways. And I’m not even going into edamame (my kids’ #1 favorite), lima, or shelling beans.

And of course, they come in the rainbow:

Yellow, purple, rattlesnake, green mottled with purple – and yard long red beans.

Sadly, these beans all (as far as I know) all lose their cool pod colors when cooked. Please let me know if you find a variety that holds its crazy colors after cooking!

Bush beans will give you an earlier, more condensed crop. You could plan ahead and plant more seeds every two weeks to keep a continuous flow of green bean goodness coming in, or plant all at once, and freeze the ones you can’t keep up with. Bush beans don’t require any staking. Mulching at the base of plants helps with both decreasing watering and keeping the mud away after it rains, making eating them raw from the garden less, well, gritty. 😉

Pole beans require some serious staking to hold up the weight of the vines and beans. There is truly no better way for kids to see the beans of their labor than with a climbing vine.

Pole beans will keep on sharing their love until you have beans coming out your ears. You may just have to learn how to make my pickled “dilly beans” because you have so many of them. There will come a day when you can’t keep up. Like the Old Farmer’s Almanac says, “Beans do not wait for anyone.”

After saving seeds for two years from my original packet of Blue Lake S7 from Jung Seed, I have more seed than I could ever use!

Harvest to Table has gathered a slew of bean varieties and their basic needs and gifts. Go ahead, geek out for the green bean team.

Growing Carrots

In some ways, these little nuggets are the opposite of vining beans. Having to wait to pull up the season’s first ‘test’ root can try even the most hardened gardeners’ patience. Yet, there are few things as fun as watching your kid pull up their first few carrots (after you’ve already done a few yourself). My kids never trusted that the next filigree green top would yield another carrot. Pure orange magic there. Of course, carrots come in a variety of cool colors too, from whites like “Lunar White” to pale yellows to vibrant reds,  and, you guessed it, deep purple.

I recommend starting with a “Nantes” type of carrot. There are 28 varieties of Nantes to chose from, and they’re still my favorite to grow. They seem to hold their straight shape better than others, taste sweet and crisp, don’t get a tough core if left to ‘mature’ in the garden soil (aka I forgot to dig out all the carrots last fall).

If you want to go deeper into the history of the carrot (and why wouldn’t you?) check out this article by Berkley Wellness. If you get a bumper crop, it’s good to know that carrots keep for months tucked into a bucket of sand left in a cool spot.

Final Thoughts on Easy Vegetable Plants to Grow

So, those are the three vegetable plants I’d start with. They are also the three I’d pare down to if I had to, but please don’t make me.

Bonus points for any garden newbie that throws down a few lettuce seeds. The options are astounding and will tingle your taste buds, guaranteed.

My Mother’s Day weekend will consist of living outside in our backyard garden and debating just how many vegetables we can eat this summer, plus how many more we can grow for the food shelf!

What will you be growing this season? What’s your favorite backyard vegetable?

Can’t wait to Dig In!

Michelle