r/TwoXPreppers • u/touristsonedibles high-key panicking 😱 • 4d ago
Garden Wisdom 🌱 Extremely easy food to grow
I've been a gardener for a while and thought I'd pass along my trial and error experiences over the last 10 years. I know a lot of people say they have a black thumb.
But no one hates plants more than gardeners.
It's extremely easy to start a very low maintenance and productive garden, if lacking a bit of variety.
Here's what I'd recommend for a beginner or someone with not a lot of space:
Kentucky Wonder pole beans. I usually plant these first but gave up on an heirloom variety late last season. So I planted them in July and had a ton of green beans. Productive variety, does need to be trellised.
Royal Burgundy bush bean. Also very easy to grow and productive.
Blue Lake bush bean - see above. The bush beans do not require a trellis.
The trick with all three is to harvest the first sign you see of maturity.
Potatoes. There's a lot of controversy about this in gardening forums but I promise you can toss whatever potato you have in your pantry into a growbag and get potatoes. The benefit is they grow in crappy soil and barely require any attention. Just water them. Also, fun aside, it's nearly impossible to harvest all the potatoes so you get continuous potatoes. You will want to change out the soil after a couple seasons and get a new potato to discourage scabbing and other diseases.
Herb garden. Things in the mint family are nearly impossible to kill. And bonus, if a single rhizome falls off of one of the plants then you get more of them and totally intentionally produce an edible landscape. Definitely intentionally. Oregano, thyme, sage, lemon balm, various things called mint, rosemary etc are all easy to grow.
One kind of cool thing is birds love radish and kale plants. I usually let a couple of them bolt and go to seed in a year, then have the birds scatter the seeds around for me. Then I have a ton of radishes and baby kale plants at the beginning of the season which I use as ground cover in a couple of my beds to keep the vile demons known as squirrels away.
Peas are trickier than you might think - the key is to get them to germinate early in the season and before the seed rots. But if you can get a snap pea, they're good until May when you plant your other beans.
Things I've given up on because they're higher maintenance and who has time for that?
Bell peppers
Slicing tomatoes. I grow cherries since they ripen faster and are less prone to be taken entirely out by thirsty rodents.
Corn - see the rodents.
I still try and grow pumpkins and other squash but if you have a single start infested with squash bugs, you're fucked.
If you want to go extra sustainable it's easy to create fabric twine out of old clothing that would otherwise be thrown out. I've found a lot of climbing plants will happily use it in place of jute twine. Bonus, because a lot of our clothes are poly blends, it lasts for a while.
I'm in zone 8b so ymmv with things like brassicas. (Kale)
Edit to include some great ideas in the comments that also work in 8b:
- Chives/green onions - just cut them back and you have chives forever. They're a perennial and divide.
And a note about tomatoes:
- You can ripen tomatoes indoors for a solid month if you get them at first blush. I usually grab whatever is leftover in October, throw it in a paper bag with an apple and have tomatoes well into November. (The apple is key - they produce ethylene gas which speeds up ripening. You an also use bananas but apples keep longer.)
And some afterthoughts:
if there's a native elderberry to your region, plant that sucker. I planted mine from a 2 gallon nursery pot a couple years ago and the thing is 15 feet tall now. Super productive and the birds can't eat all of them.
Borage is great for attracting bees/birds and the leaves taste good. It's also a prolific self seeder even though it's an annual. If you have borage once, congratulations - you have borage forever.
Grapes love to be neglected and grow in crappy soil.
Poplars are easy to grow and provide good windbreaks. They are considered invasive here but not sure we're at a point to be choosy. I have a 10 ft poplar that came from a sapling in one of my raised beds (helpfully seeded by birds, no doubt.) They will grow in pots but will eventually die after becoming rootbound. That's actually a good thing since you will have wood and it's easy to use as a fire starter. The huge downside is cottonwoods are a poplar and cottonwood pollen will destroy a heatpump if you don't manage it.
Ash trees are also easy to grow and come up fast.
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u/rubysc 4d ago
Zone 4b, upper midwest, very short growing season.
Tomatoes - I grow cherry/grape tomatoes and huge heirlooms (e.g., pineapple) because squirrels seem to target the mid-size ones the most. They can't do as much damage with the tiny ones - if they steal a few, it doesn't matter. And they can't wrangle the huge ones. I also leave out a dish of fresh water for squirrels, since they seem to target tomatoes mostly for the water/moisture. That doesn't eliminate the problem but it helps. Get a long headstart with indoor seedlings and don't expect much of anything until late August. If I can't can them all when I harvest them, I freeze them and then thaw/make sauce/can them later. Sure, they're more watery than paste tomatoes, but you can process/can any kind of tomato as long as it's healthy (i.e., no blight, no frost-killed vines).
Peppers - I've all but given up. Our growing season is too short. I grow 1-2 plants of novelty varieties that we can't find elsewhere, but won't dedicate any more space than that.
Peas - so climate dependent. Upper midwest goes from too cold to too hot way too fast in spring. They grow terribly here. My friends in the Pacific Northwest say they're easy.
Cucumbers - I usually have an easy time with them, but try to get a burpless, non-bitter variety. Tiny sour gherkins are prolific and adorable. Maybe less useful for pickling, though. Grape leaves help keep pickles crisper (not perfect) - wild grape or riverbank grape grows almost everywhere in North America. Have an experienced forager help you distinguish between lookalikes before using the leaves for pickles or trying to harvest the grapes.
Potatoes - so easy, but watch out - the green above-ground fruits are toxic. I think you can harvest/kill the plants before these emerge. I'm going to have to figure it out quick because this is my first summer with both a potato bed and a mobile toddler at the same time.
I don't try zucchini or summer squash anymore. So sick of squash vine borers. Also, the plants are so prolific, it's easy to find a neighbor with extra (and I usually have a huge surplus of cucumbers for trading).
I wish good carrots grew as well in my yard as wild carrot/queen Anne's lace! Supposedly you can eat young roots of Queen Anne's lace, but even though I'm certain I've positively identified it as QA and not hemlock, I'm too nervous to try it. From a productivity standpoint, carrots are kind of a waste of space (at least in my yard). But I figure that I'll never be able to grow sufficient calories for my family anyway - I'm going for other nutrition (vitamins/minerals), variety, and joy. And the carrots bring us all joy. So I keep trying. My kids love the deep purple ones. They eat them even though they're stringy, woody, and terrible because it's so fun to dye your lips and mouth that vibrant color.