The Easiest Vegetables for a First Garden, Ranked by How Hard They Are to Kill
If you’re planning your first vegetable garden this winter, the lists of “easy vegetables” you’ll find are long and not very honest. Half of what’s on them is easy for someone who already knows what they’re doing. Carrots turn up on every one, and carrots have humbled better gardeners than either of us.
So this list is ranked a different way. Not by how easy a crop is to grow well, but by how much neglect it can take before it gives up on you. A first garden gets forgotten for a hot week in July. It gets watered unevenly and planted a little late. These are the vegetables that still feed you after all that.
The ranking
The days to harvest are the usual ranges printed on seed packets, and they vary by variety. For transplants they’re counted from the day the plant goes in the ground, not from seed.
| Rank | Vegetable | How to plant | Days to first harvest |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Swiss chard | Sow direct | 50 to 60 (baby leaves sooner) |
| 2 | Bush beans | Sow direct | 50 to 60 |
| 3 | Zucchini | Sow direct or buy a plant | 45 to 60 |
| 4 | Radishes | Sow direct | 22 to 30 |
| 5 | Cherry tomatoes | Buy a plant | 55 to 70 from transplant |
| 6 | Leaf lettuce | Sow direct or buy plants | 45 to 55 (baby leaves about 30) |
| 7 | Kale | Buy plants or sow direct | 50 to 65 from transplant |
| 8 | Peas | Sow direct | 55 to 70 |
1. Swiss chard
Chard is the hardest thing on this list to kill. It handles summer heat that sends lettuce and spinach to seed, it shrugs off light frosts, and you can cut the outer leaves for months from the same plants. Leaf miners will scribble pale tunnels in a few leaves. Pick those off and carry on.
The only real way to fail with chard is to forget to eat it.
2. Bush beans
Bean seeds are big enough to handle easily, they come up fast in warm soil, and bush types need no support. The one rule is to wait until the soil has warmed up after your last frost. Beans sown into cold, wet ground tend to rot before they come up, which is the usual reason a first bean row is patchy.
Pick them every couple of days once they start. A plant left full of big old pods slows down.
3. Zucchini
One plant is plenty for most households, and two will have you leaving bags on the neighbours’ porches. It grows fast enough that you’ll see the difference from one morning to the next, which is good for morale.
It ranks third rather than first because of what can happen late in the summer. Powdery mildew shows up on the leaves in most gardens eventually, and in some regions squash vine borers can collapse a plant almost overnight. By then you’ve usually eaten well.
4. Radishes
Radishes are the fastest thing you can grow from seed, and that speed is what makes them forgiving. If a sowing goes wrong you find out in three weeks and sow again. What goes wrong is nearly always heat. Sown in the warm end of spring they bolt or turn woody and hot, so treat them as an early-spring and autumn crop.
5. Cherry tomatoes
A tomato from seed is a project. A cherry tomato bought as a plant in late spring is one of the most generous things a beginner can put in the ground. The small-fruited types tend to crop sooner and more freely than the big slicers. Give them a stake or a cage and full sun.
Tomatoes do get more problems than anything above them on this list, mostly leaf diseases late in the season. A cherry tomato usually outproduces those problems for long enough to make you very happy.
6. Leaf lettuce
Loose-leaf lettuce is easy right up until it’s hot. Like radishes it’s a spring and autumn crop, and in the middle of summer it bolts and turns bitter. Slugs like it as much as you do. Sow a short row every couple of weeks rather than one long one, and you’ll pick leaves for longer and waste fewer.
7. Kale
Kale takes cold better than almost anything, and a frost sweetens it. It’s lower on the list because of cabbage worms, the green caterpillars of the small white butterflies you’ll see over it in summer. They can riddle the leaves if nobody looks. A fine net over the plants keeps the butterflies off.
8. Peas
Peas are easy to grow and easy to get the timing wrong on. They have to go in early, weeks before your last frost, and they stop producing when the weather gets hot. Sow them late and you’ll get a few pods and a lot of yellowing vines. They also need something to climb. Get the date right and they’re no trouble at all.
What to leave off a first list
Carrots are the obvious one. The seed is tiny, it can take two or three weeks to come up, and the soil has to stay damp the whole time. A lot of first carrot rows come up patchy or not at all, and it isn’t the gardener’s fault. Try them in your second year.
I’d also skip anything you have to start from seed indoors (peppers, eggplant, onions from seed) and anything with a long season and a lot of sprawl, like melons and pumpkins. Cauliflower too. None of them are impossible. They ask for more than a first year usually has to give.
The thing that kills more first gardens than any crop
It’s almost never the choice of vegetable. It’s the spot. Most of the crops above want six hours or more of direct sun, and only the leafy ones (chard, lettuce, kale) put up with much less. A bed in half shade turns the easy list into a hard one.
The other is timing. A first-timer usually plants everything on one warm weekend in May, which is too late for peas and lettuce and, in some places, slightly early for beans. Each of these crops has its own date, counted from your last frost rather than from the calendar on the wall. The planting calendar in Garden Planner Pro works those dates out from your location, so when you sit down with the seed catalogues over the winter you’ll know which of these goes in first.
I grew too many things badly in my first year. If I did it again I’d pick four from this list, plant them on the right dates, and look at the bed every day. That last part counts for more than the rest put together.
