7 Beginner Vegetable Garden Tips to Give You a Strong Start

When longtime city dweller Faith Salmon moved with her husband, Matt, from Brooklyn to Nashville, Tennessee, they were excited to start their first vegetable garden. Through their wins (and fails), they’ve honed in on a few vegetable gardening tips for beginners. “Every time we harvest vegetables, it feels like a notch on our self-reliance belt.” Here’s their best advice to beginners to veggie gardening.

Tips for Starting a Veggie Garden

To help your own learning curve be less steep, Salmon shares veggie garden tips, including how she laid the foundation for her successful kitchen garden.

1. Find your light.

Planned in the winter when the sun was lower in the sky, the garden didn’t get enough sun the first summer, so they hired an arborist to cut branches from an old oak tree for more sunlight.

2. Limit bed size.

Whether you’re planting vegetables in the ground or a raised bed, keep planting beds narrow, no more than four feet wide. “I wanted to be able to reach in to harvest without stepping in and compacting the soil down,” Salmon says. To keep wood costs down the couple limited their raised beds to one foot tall. Go taller if you would like to minimize bending over.

3. Create healthy soil.

“Planting is only a small part of gardening. It’s actually all about building soil,” says Salmon, who continuously amends her raised beds with composted manure. She also layers on compost as mulch, and plants cover crops, so the soil is rarely exposed.

4. Tap local resources.

When she started, Salmon spent a lot of time chatting with people at her local nursery. “It feels good to talk to people who have experience with the climate and can reassure you the mildew on your squash plants is just part of growing in Tennessee.” She also recommends finding a regional source for crops adapted to your area. She buys seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and seedlings from the farmers market.

5. Expect pests.

The couple still battle insects, and combats them using organic pest-control practices. These include hand-picking insects off plants, fencing to keep out critters, and neem oil applications. Because of this, Salmon now plants 20 percent more than what she thinks she’ll need to make up for potential losses.

6. Practice succession planting and crop rotation.

Salmon replaces spring crops such as alliums, radishes, and greens after the weather heats up. She plants heat-loving summer squash, bell peppers, tomatoes, basil, and wax beans in their place. Succession planting keeps the produce coming all season long. She also rotates which vegetables she plants in each bed every year to help minimize pests and diseases.

7. Keep learning.

Salmon learned how to maximize space during an online course at squarefootgardening.com. Now that she has the hang of it, she sketches each season’s crops to track what grew where and how well it did.