Gardening Is the Key to Happiness (and It’s Easy!)

Here are the vegetables anyone can grow, from beginners to pros with their own greenhouses:

Lettuce, peas, onions, beets, potatoes, beans, and radishes.

Lettuce leaves for your salads are the easiest edible crop to grow. A few varieties will be ready to harvest in weeks! Choose a seed mix that will give you a variety of leaves for different tastes, colors, and textures. For best results, sow in stages so you don’t get loads all at once. Sow a couple of lanes every few weeks throughout the summer to ensure a continuous supply.

Once you are a pro with lettuce, grow spinach and rocket (a.k.a. arugula) for your salad bowl.

Peas are a trouble-free crop that can handle cooler weather, so you can skip the step of starting the seedlings indoors. Simply sow the seeds in the ground from March onwards and watch them thrive. The plants will need support—put in stakes or chicken wire attached to posts and occasionally wind the stems around the supports as they grow. Harvest your fresh peas from June to August—the more you pick; the more will grow.

Onions are problem free and easy to propagate. After your seedlings sprout, thin seedlings to an inch apart, and then thin again in four weeks to six inches apart. Onions are a staple for cooking, so you and your family will be grateful once you have established an onion patch in your kitchen garden.

Potatoes and beets are a high return for your labor. To me, the best way to grow both is the world’s laziest way to garden; I remember reading about it when I was ten in a book by Thalassa Crusoe, a pioneering organic gardener. I was fascinated that you could grow root vegetables without even needing to turn any soil. You can grow potatoes, yams, and so on under straw! Simply cut up mature potatoes that have “eyes” or the fleshy tubers sprouting out of the flesh of the potato, making sure each piece has an eye. This will give a new potato. After you “plant” or place the seed potatoes chunks on the ground, put loose straw over the pieces and between all the rows at least four to six inches deep. When the seed pieces start growing, your potato sprouts will emerge through the straw cover. How easy was that? Crusoe also said you could do the same under wet, shredded newspaper, but straw is more organic.

Radishes have enjoyed a new popularity thanks to Korean and Japanese cuisine. They add a fun pop of spicy, tangy flavor to soups, stews, tempura, salads, and all on their own. They can grow equally well in the ground in spring or in a pot. Radishes like a lot of sun and well-drained soil. They are also a crop you can grow in several crops per season. If you keep the soil moist, you’ll have big beautiful radishes to brighten any dish.

Green beans are the opposite of the low-maintenance beets and potatoes as they will need staking or poles for support. However, an easier path to a great crop of green beans can be to grow them in a five-gallon container. After they have gotten four or five feet long, place a pole or stake carefully in the pot and allow the bean vines to wind around. Soon you’ll have a pot of beans even grandma might recognize as a favorite vegetable for any occasion.