11 Tips for the Beginner Gardener – How to Grow More Food

As a beginner gardener, it can be a challenge to know where to start and what to do to grow more food. But there are some simple steps you can take to make your garden more abundant. Here are 11 tips to get you started.

While these 11 tips are aimed at helping a beginner gardener grow more food, even an experienced gardener can benefit from them.

These tips are focused on helping you to work with nature to grow more food.

When you implement these tips, you’re starting down a journey that will let you cultivate abundance for people, plants and wildlife, and make the living world around you come alive.

Ready to get started and grow more food? Let’s dive into these 11 tips for the beginner gardener! But before you do, make sure you grab your free and easy-to-print cheat-sheet. This cheat-sheet lists all 11 tips in an easy format that you can print and take out into the garden with you.

1. Mulch Your Garden

Mulching is my go-to soil amendment. When you apply mulch to your soil, you’re helping your garden in so many ways. You help keep it moist, you build soil, you keep weeds down, and you support beneficial soil life and other beneficial critters. (And many of these critters will eat your garden pests!).

All of this means your plants will be less stressed and more productive. And every year you use mulch, your soil will steadily improve.

All this results in growing more food.

2. Don’t Go Overboard with Your Veggies

3. Grow Your Greens and Other Easy Vegetables

As a beginner gardener, start with these easy-to-grow vegetables. Then build on your success and add 1 or 2 harder-to-grow vegetables next year.

You can grow more food by starting with easy vegetables and expanding from there.

4. Build a Worm Bin and Practice Chop-and-Drop

5. Add Flowers to Your Garden

6. Don’t Overwater Your Plants

Have you seen the suggestion that your garden needs an inch of water every week? I see this all over. But my garden doesn’t need anything close to that. If you keep your garden mulched and work to improve your soil each year, you can dramatically reduce how much you water your garden needs.

But every garden is different. The key is to observe your plants and your soil. You want to give your plants enough water, without over-watering.

Assuming your garden is mulched, just stick your finger down under the mulch and check to see if the soil is still damp. If the soil is still damp under the mulch, then you don’t need to water your garden.

Also, watch your plants and look for signs of heat-related stress. Often heat-stressed plants will start to wilt. If you start seeing this, you will likely need to water your plants.

But wait and see if your plants rebound in the evening. If they do, then check the soil and see if the soil is still moist. I would skip watering if the soil is still moist even if the leaves were wilting during the day.

If the wilting continues on a daily basis, try giving each plant that shows signs of wilting a deep watering. Don’t water plants that show no signs of wilting.

A deep watering is key. You want your vegetables to send their roots down as deep as possible to take in more soil moisture.

Giving your plants frequent, shallow watering encourages your plants to keep their roots near the surface, as opposed to going deep.

A larger, deeper root system will also help your plants reach more nutrients in the soil, resulting in more growth and larger harvests for your family and community.

7. Plant in Polycultures

What is a polyculture? A polyculture is best understood when compared to a monoculture. A monoculture is when each garden bed only grows a single type of vegetable.

This would be 1 bed for tomatoes, 1 bed for onions, 1 bed for lettuce, etc.

In a polyculture, you might have a single garden bed with tomatoes, onions, and lettuce all mixed together.

The key as a beginner gardener is not to go overboard. If you try to mix in too many types of plants, it can get hard to harvest. Especially if you’re just learning how to harvest your vegetables!

A great way to get started is to pick 2 or 3 similar-sized vegetables and just alternate them in a single row. An example would be to start a row with 1 lettuce, then 1 chard, then 1 broccoli—then just repeat this pattern.

8. Plant Vegetable Starts Instead of Seeds

Direct-seeding does have a number of advantages but when you’re just starting out it can be a challenge. You will need to learn how to direct-seed each vegetable (including depth and timing), you’ll need to keep the seeds moist but not too wet, and then thin the resulting plants.

Buying vegetable starts will be the easiest way. And while this is costs money, it’s generally cheaper than if you bought the final harvested vegetable from the store.

Plus, depending on where you live, you may have a hard time growing many sun-loving plants like tomatoes unless you use starts.

Growing your own starts is another option, but that may be more than you want to do as a beginner gardener. (Though it’s a great option if you have the space and knowledge to do so.)

The reason to buy starts is that you can get your garden going quickly and easily. To this day, I still buy starts each year, despite growing many of my vegetables from seed. The ease of it sometimes just makes the most sense.

9. Direct-Seed Vegetables with Large Seeds

Yup, now I’m going to tell you to direct-seed your vegetables! Just not all of them—at least as a beginner gardener.

Some vegetables have large seeds. Vegetables like corn, peas, beans, and squash. This makes them really easy to direct sow.

You likely won’t need to thin them, and they’re easy to direct seed at the proper depth.

With the exception of some plants like melons that need long growing seasons, (starting them indoors and transplanting later can extend the growing season for these plants), I don’t see any reason not to direct seed these plants.

Peas and beans are especially easy to direct-seed, and they’re generally very forgiving.

So with these large-seeded vegetables, skip the starts and just direct-seed them into your garden. This is a great way for you as a beginner gardener to get experience with direct-seeding your vegetables.

10. Don’t Forget About the Sun

As a gardener, it’s easy to be focused down on the ground—at your plants and your soil. But don’t forget to think about the sun, too.

You know your garden needs sun. And as a beginner gardener, you may be worried that your garden won’t get enough of it. Don’t let that stop you.

Not all vegetables need full sun (6+ hours). And many actually produce longer if they get some shade.

If your garden doesn’t get full sun, then long-season vegetables like some peppers, large tomatoes, melons and corn may not be a good choice for you.

But others, like lettuce, spinach, kale and many other greens, are happy in partial shade.

Even cherry tomatoes can be grown in less than full sun.

You can even use taller plants like climbing green beans and tomatoes to cast shade behind them (on the north side in the northern hemisphere and south side in the southern hemisphere) to keep greens like lettuce and spinach going longer into the summer without bolting (going to seed).

I even have kale growing under a cherry tree where it only gets a few hours of sunlight each day.

11. You Can Grow Vegetables Outside Your Garden

As a beginner gardener, you’re probably starting with a small garden. Using these other growing areas is a great way to grow more food without having to build a larger garden.

Growing More Food as a Beginner Gardener