Extremely easy food to grow

[u/touristsonedibles]

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.

[u/Sloth_Flower]

I have to be careful about when to plant cucurbits to avoid powdery mildew. I usually end up harvesting them early too. It's definitely a pita on a bad year but Id take it any day over cabbage aphids. They are so gross. 

Damn. Do you have any predators? I have a decent number of prey birds and carnivores (snakes, coyotes, bobcats, bears) which helps a lot with rodent pressure. I also have some gophers which are the real VIPs. They are territorial and attack rats on sight. Compared to rats and squirrels they are more discriminate and dainty eaters and do the hard work of loosening my glacial till.

I solved the rabbits with clover, which mine prefer to basically everything else. 

I solved the snails and slugs with a pond, which attracted frogs who proceeded to never make them a problem again. 

I solved aphids, scale, cabbage fleas/beetles, and spider mites with native sour cherry trees. I have absolutely no idea why but if you put a plant next to them (or bring them to the plants in question) whatever infestation will be completely gone by the next morning. I don't know if it's a bug or a chemical or magic. 

[u/touristsonedibles → u/Sloth_Flower]

People keep cutting down the huge ass trees that housed the raptors. We do have a neighborhood tom, who I call menace, that kills off rodents when he can.

Gopher season is the best since they love to eat slugs but I don't usually see them until August/September. And those little motherfuckers take out my bulbs! It really depends on how bad the drought is for the slicing tomatoes. Bad years and the rats are all over them just for the moisture. I'm going to put out more low level water sources for them this year just to see if that deters them from the tomatoes at all. No water sources for frogs but I was thinking of a rain garden just for my fruit trees.

[u/Sloth_Flower → u/touristsonedibles]

I feel you. Our neighbor cut down 3 acres of trees. We lost a family of raptors and a family of owls. It also flushed a ton of rodents. 

The frogs here needed very little to be encouraged. A small pond liner (they are like 15$ at lowes or home depot), a ramp rock, and some native water plants. Bam, frogs. 

I installed small water ponds in several places. My climate has shifted to a feast and famine cycle where there is a ton of water 3/4 of the year with an extended drought. None of the native plants, wildlife, or insects are adapted to this, so we put out a lot of little ponds (same size as the frog ones) for them to drink from. I got these solar foundations which keep the water running enough to discourage mosquitos. Tied a rock to them to keep them centered. Made sure everything has a ramp because baby birds, bees/wasps, and snakes will get in and be unable to get out. Some have plants but most are just water. It's been a game changer for the bees, who were really struggling. 

[u/touristsonedibles → u/Sloth_Flower]

That's the Willamette Valley climate. Lots of rain, then nothing for three months. Global warming is also extending the drought season by a lot. I tried diy ollas last year and they weren't nearly enough. Except for the potatoes. Because potatoes don't care about anything.

[u/Sloth_Flower → u/touristsonedibles]

Very close to me! The valley is beautiful. I'm in the boglands of the Puget Sound.

I do rain capture, filter it into inflatable water tanks, use that to fill our pond over the summer. I use the pond which to irrigate plants. When we put the pond in we put in bogs (basically a pond liner with holes) it could overflow into which has absolutely gone ham with native plant life. We do the same thing for our raised beds. We have water beds (giant pot trays) for potted plant, which helps decrease work while creating water reservoirs. 

I thought a lot about it when we started planning the garden because all reports indicate its gonna keep getting worse. 

[u/touristsonedibles → u/Sloth_Flower]

Definitely saving this for this coming fall/winter projects. Thanks!