How to Start a Veggie Garden at Home

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How to Start a Veggie Garden at Home:- Starting a food garden at home doesn’t require thousands of dollars or plant knowledge! A few beds, dirt, seeds, tools, and a day’s labor can turn any suburban yard into a great veggie garden. This straightforward step-by-step approach is perfect for those who have always wanted to garden but don’t know where to start.

We handled all logistics, saving you time and money. This article covers the fastest, easiest, and most successful ways to grow food immediately. Even without a “green thumb,” this garden arrangement will help you grow your own food without making rookie mistakes. Let’s explore the 6 stages to growing vegetables at home!

Table of Contents

6 Steps to Start a Veggie Garden

Even master gardeners started over! Before farming dozens of acres of rainbow organic vegetables for big farmer’s market stands, I started with a backyard garden of wooden raised beds and Habitat for Humanity materials.
A kind German gardening couple guided me, thankfully. Walt and Marielu advised me on quality wood, hardware, soil, local resources, and garden design.
They helped me have free wood chip mulch dumped at my property from local arborists and made sure my gardens weren’t shaded by my house.
My first gardening accomplishment was greatly improved by these easy methods. I would have wasted time, money, and headaches without their advice!

Starting From Seed

Why Begin with a Seed?

You can start a garden for much less money by starting from seeds instead of buying plants that have already been grown. A box of seeds that costs $2 to $4 might have 100 seeds in it, but a $7 pack of vegetable seedlings only has 6 plants. You can watch your plants grow from seed to harvest if you plant seeds. This way, you can see what fertilizer and other inputs were used on each plant.

Putting down seeds

Use this general rule of thumb to figure out how deep to put your seeds: Put seeds in the ground two times as wide as they are tall. To plant a seed, make a small hole in the middle of each cell and put the seed inside.
Fill the depression with water until it is twice as deep as the seed is wide.
Planting small seeds like basil and lettuce very shallowly is best. Planting bigger seeds like cucumbers and tomatoes deeper is better.
You can plant some seeds, like onions, in small groups inside each cell.
Some plants, like peppers or kale, can be put with one to two seeds in each cell.
Once they sprout, you will have to thin them so that there is only one plant per cell.
Most vegetables that do well in early spring are peppers, tomatoes, onions, leeks, and greens.
For warmer weather crops that grow quickly, like pumpkins, zucchini, winter squash, and cucumbers, you should wait until later in the spring to plant them.
Like, tomato plants usually grow in a seed box for one to two months before they go into the ground. So you can start tomato seeds up to 6–8 weeks before the last frost date and watch them grow strong while you wait for the weather to get warmer.
If the plants get too big for their cell boxes, you may need to “up-pot” them, which means move them to a bigger pot.

Buying Nursery Seedlings

If you don’t want to wait, you should buy established plants instead of starting from seeds. It costs more but takes less time to plant seeds that have already been grown in a nursery. If you buy seedlings instead of starting from seeds for cabbage or kale, you may save one to two weeks.
You can get up to one to two months ahead of schedule if you buy tomatoes that are already grown. You can avoid having to wait two to three months for seeds to sprout by using herbs like sage or rosemary instead.
For beginners, this is usually easier because you don’t have to set up a seed-starting system or worry about messing up the seeds as they grow. When you start with seedlings instead of established plants, you get a faster return and a better chance of success.
You just need to pick out healthy plants at the garden center and move them to your new yard at the right time.

Always look for these things when you pick your seedlings:

Verdant green leaves: The leaves should be a healthy shade of green and not be turning yellow or brown.
Straight plant growth: The roots should be able to stand up straight without falling over (unless it’s a vine, like a tomato vine).
Bushy or multi-stemmed growth: Strong bushing or a lot of seeds crowded together in a pot gives you stronger starts that can sometimes be split up to make more plants.
Not any flowers: When buying most plants, like strawberries or tomatoes, it’s best to get them without flowers so that they can focus on root and leaf growth right away.
If you hold the plant by the base and move it out of the pot, you can see if the roots look healthy. Avoid these plants if they are tightly wound around in the shape of the pot. They will have a harder time healing after being moved.

Plant Themed Beds

Giving your flower beds a “theme” can help you take better care of them. That is, you want to set up plants so that they can grow next to others that are similar. To be honest, no one wants to be stuck with someone who doesn’t like the same things they do.
Follow these “themed” bed ideas to arrange your plants in the best way to get the most out of small areas and get the most crops.

**How to Start a Veggie Garden at Home**

Also see:- 7 Signs You’re Overwatering Your Tomatoes

Herb Bed

It’s easy to group Mediterranean herbs together because they all like being in the sun, having dirt that drains well, and being dry.
Most of them are also perennials, which is great because you only have to plant them once and don’t have to move the bed around as often as you do with annual veggies.
Because you can pick these herbs when you’re cooking, it’s best to put them in a bed close to the kitchen:
Sage and Rosemary
Lemon balm
Garlic and oregano
Basil is actually an annual, but it looks great with this theme. Leave 18 to 24 inches of space between these herbs.
Taller plants should be planted toward the back (northern part) of the bed so that the shorter plants can stay in the sun without getting shade.
Sage and rosemary should be in the back of the bed in the picture above, while thyme and oregano can grow along the edge and overflow.

Strawberry Bed

Strawberries with shallow roots do very well in a low bed. These plants that bear fruit every two years or all year are great for beginners because they grow quickly and can produce a lot of fruit just a few months after planting.
If you want your strawberries to grow outward, put them 12 to 24 inches apart in a random pattern. Make sure you don’t plant too deeply, because if the strawberry crown gets buried in dirt, it will quickly die.
Look for where the new leaves are coming up at the base of the strawberry to find the crown. The ground should stay below this level.
Make a hole about as deep as the strawberry seedling’s root ball and put it in it. This is the right way to plant strawberries. Tamp down the dirt around the base gently to get rid of any air pockets, then tuck the new plants in.
When the plants are very young, you want them to put all of their energy into making strong roots and leaves. By cutting off the flowers, you tell them to focus on “vegetative” growth first, which means green growth, before they make fruits and flowers.
They’ll have plenty of time to grow new flowers when it gets warmer in the spring, which should be in a few weeks.

Salad Bed

Growing lettuce and greens is easy because they grow quickly and require little care. Carefully remove your seedlings from their trays and arrange them on the bed. Mix & match plants or plant the same species together.
Salad bed spacing might be very loose. Planting lettuce seedlings close together produces “baby greens” that are easy to pick. However, to get full-size lettuce heads (like romaine), you must space plants 8-12″ apart. The same goes for kale, mustards, spinach, and other leafy greens.
For extra space between plants, stagger spacing (zig-zag). The greens have a few inches more space to leaf out without hitting their neighbors.

Brassica Bed

Common mustard-family crops include kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. Interestingly, most of these veggies have species variants.
Cross-pollinating flowers and storing seeds has helped gardeners and plant breeders create plants with specific tastes and appearances.
Similar to how dog breeders propagate features and create diverse breeds from wolfy ancestors.
Kale is bred for its frilly leaves, while broccoli has a larger central blossom.
Brussels sprouts feature several little cabbage-like heads along a stalk, while cabbage has a huge circular head.
Spacing is crucial for developing any brassica plant! Minimum brassica spacing is 18-24”. The square foot gardening method requires 1.5 to 2 squares per plant.
Without enough space, brassicas won’t create a “head.” The central leaves of cabbage plants curl together to produce a dense head when they grow in large florets.
If there isn’t enough space between plants, the cabbage won’t “head up,” resulting in meager cabbages or collard green-like growth.

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