How To Start An Organic Vegetable Garden From Scratch
Few things are more satisfying than picking fresh, clean, organic food that you’ve grown yourself, washing it off and cooking with it only moments later.
But how do you get started? And can you start a vegetable garden without any gardening experience?
Well, the good news is you can! I did it in 2020 and in 2022 and in this article I’m going to walk you through the steps that you need to take to turn this cottage dream into a reality. Let’s transform that empty lawn into a productive growing space!
Picking Your Growing Space
There are four popular methods for growing food: directly in the ground, in pots, in raised beds or in greenhouses. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks (and costs!) and you should consider your own needs and your available space when deciding.
Growing food in the ground is as simple as it gets. If you have a lawn or patch of earth, you can grow food in it. You’ll need to remove the grass and clear any weeds, and you might want to feed the soil with compost but that’s about all you need to do.
Plants grown in the ground have access to more moisture so you don’t need to worry so much about watering regularly.
If you have access to soil and have no preference, then this is a great place to start and I think growing this way produces the tastiest veg.
Growing in containers is a great option for gardens with large patio areas or if you only have a balcony. Quality pots can be expensive but can last a lifetime. You will want to refresh the soil every few years and water pretty much every day but you can grow pretty much anything in a container.
If you haven’t got access to open ground or you are very limited on space or you simply want to maximise what you produce, then container gardening and vertical gardening is probably for you.
Raised beds have become a very trendy way of growing food but they also make gardening much more accessible if you have mobility issues. They are somewhere between growing in the ground and in containers but at waist height, so you don’t need to bend down, pest issues are somewhat reduced and weeds are less prevalent.
Unless you can get free wood (or don’t mind chemical treatments of reclaimed woods like railway sleepers), they can be expensive to build and to fill up with soil but they are very visually pleasing, easy to maintain, and few people seem to regret using them.
Greenhouses make growing crops from warmer climates much easier. By trapping the sun’s heat and elevating the soil and air temperature, plant growth, food production and fruit ripening is quickened. This helps if your garden doesn’t provide a long-enough growing season for the plant or is too cool.
There are many types of greenhouse and they vary in price (and can get very expensive!) but are very useful for growers looking to produce crops like aubergines or loofahs/luffas that require a long hot season. At the cheapest end are plastic greenhouses (I’ve written extensively about their pros and cons) and on the expensive end are ones built in the style of Victorian glasshouses.
And there’s nothing stopping you from using a combination of these methods!
What Vegetables Should You Grow?
How to choose what food to grow at home could be it’s own essay, but the simplest way of deciding is to grow what you enjoy eating so that you are rewarded for your labour.
That’s why I spent my first year growing tomatoes, peppers, runner beans and sweetcorn in a tiny patio garden.
However growing my own food has really opened my eyes to what foods are out there. I had never knowingly eaten a radish or beetroot before growing one, I had never tried fresh sweetcorn or beefsteak tomatoes, and I had no idea that courgettes (zucchini) could even be yellow.
Wanting to eat my own food over winter during the frosty months, I grew crops like rainbow chard and perpetual spinach, and went from never having eaten them to relying on them all year round.
So grow what you love but also try and use your growing space to experiment and find new and interesting foods that you haven’t tried before, aren’t available in the supermarket or have long been forgotten.
Starting A Vegetable Garden From Seed
Growing food from seed is both physically and spiritually nourishing. Watching a seed sprout still feels miraculous each and every time and caring for your plant babies throughout the complete life-cycle is deeply fulfilling.
Growing from seed is more work than buying plants from a nursery but it’s much cheaper and, with a bit of planning and a lot of podcasts to catch up on, filling pots with compost and sowing seeds is a fun way of spending those dark winter nights while we wait for the garden to spring into life.
It’s important that you sow seeds at the right time so that your plants get enough light and heat to grow healthily. But it’s also important that you start seeds early enough so they can finish producing food before the growing season is over. You can use online seed sowing calendars to find when to sow each type of seed in your growing zone.
For instance, annual plants like tomatoes and peppers won’t survive frosts (they hate temperatures below 10 °C (50 °F) so its important to start them early in the year them enough time to produce fruit but not so early that they run out light and go leggy and fail to grow.
I like starting tomatoes in mid-February to early-March ready to plant out in the second or third week of May but If you have a short growing season or want to get an earlier harvest and sow seeds earlier, then you may need to use grow lights to give them a head start.
Meanwhile biennials and hardy crops such as purple sprouting broccoli and chard can be started the year before because will survive the winter frosts. But it’s still a good idea to give them enough time to grow big enough to become established and strong enough so they can resist the worst of the weather, so starting them in early autumn or the spring is usually the best bet.
Buying Plants Online Or In-Store
The quickest way to get started is to buy plant starts. These are plants that have been grown in nurseries, are often a month or two old, and sold in garden centres or online and delivered straight to your door. This can be more expensive than growing from seeds but is much more convenient, especially if you are starting your garden mid-season.
Plants tend to go on sale at the time of year when you need to put them in the ground, so regular trips to your local garden centre can be a great way of finding out which plants can be grown in your area. However they can sometimes put plants out a little early, so you may still need to provide frost protection and grow them on in pots during the early spring.
Many annual plants would have been grown in heated greenhouses so you might also still need to take the time to harden-off the plants so that they are prepared for conditions outdoors.
Hardening-Off Your Plants
Tender annuals originating from warm climates and almost all young plants can be quite badly damaged by cold weather or killed in a frost so you should keep an eye on the weather and shelter your plants from the worst of the cold.
But as we approach our last frost dates (the latest date when frost was observed in our area, averaged over the last 20 years), we can start to prepare our plants for life in the great outdoors.
Wind, UV light and cooler temperatures don’t exist within most homes. So we need to gradually expose plants to the elements so that plants can acclimatise and become strong enough to withstand outdoor conditions. This is called hardening-off.
Start with a few hours on warm, cloudy and still days from about two weeks before the last frost and slowly increase the time that they are outside until your seedlings are strong enough to stay outside all day in bright sun and windy conditions.
Preparing The Soil (To Dig Or Not To Dig?)
There are two main ways of clearing a growing space. One is to use a shovel to remove the grass layer (lifting turf) and then digging a hole a spit-deep (the length of a spade) to break the subsoil, lifting and turning the soil as you do so to expose it to the air. Do this along the width of your bed and then along its length until your growing space is clear and let the lumps break down over winter. This is the dig method. And, yes… It’s a lot of work.
It can take a long time, requires good posture & technique to avoid injury (e.g. only dig small widths of soil to limit the weight) and can be challenging if you have mobility issues. It also destroys the soil structure, damages microbiology and requires you to manually remove perennial weeds. It also exposes annual weed seeds and encourages them to germinate.
An alternative method is to use a ‘no-dig‘ approach. This takes far less effort and doesn’t damage the soil but unless you have access to a lot of free or home-made compost, it can be a much more expensive approach.
To clear a growing space the no-dig way, apply a water-permeable biodegradable layer such as cardboard to the ground in the early spring, give it a good soaking with some water, then add an inch of compost (or more) on top and firm in gently with your foot. Job done!
You can then immediately start planting and, in a month or two, the biodegradable layer will be weak enough for roots to penetrate deeper into the soil. However for those first two months, the cardboard acts as a weed suppressant by preventing foliage from reaching the surface and accessing sunlight – removing the weeds underneath and providing a weed-seed growing area on top that’s packed full of nutrients.
Getting Plants In The Ground
As discussed earlier, the exact time to plant your plants in the ground depends a lot on your climate, in particular on your last frost date or your growing zone — if you plant too early, you risk losing plants. If you haven’t grown in your area before, use an online calendar or your seed packet to find out when to plant.
But before you put plants in their permanent homes, be sure to also check the recommended space to leave between plants when filling your vegetable beds.
Plant roots spread a certain distance, absorb water at a given rate and require different amounts of nutrients, all of which is determined by the species and variety. By sticking roughly to the recommended separation for the variety and, you should be able to prevent plants from competing for resources and maximise yield.
Although some plants like sweetcorn have quirks (don’t plant them in straight rows!) and there are a few more factors that will affect how successful your vegetable patch will be.
Deciding How To Layout Your Garden
While getting plant spacing is important for plant nourishment, how you layout your garden and where you choose to put your plants and your vegetable beds or your pots, will have an impact on how fruitful your garden will be. You should consider factors like:
How much sunlight is available – plants are often split into three groups: shade, part-shade and full-sun; and this represents how much light the plant needs to grow healthily. For example, tomatoes need full sun which means they need at least six hours of direct light a day.
Be sure to note where the sun falls and how the shade is cast in your garden throughout the seasons when planning out your vegetable garden as this will impact the success of your growing space.
Where the water flows – plants like rosemary and lavender prefer the ground to be drier, plants like spinach and cauliflower do well in damper patches, and almost no plants like fully waterlogged soil. You’ll tend to find wet soil in low lying areas that are hidden away in shade all day, while dry soil is usually higher up, in full sun, and might be more rocky or near plants or trees that suck up a lot of water.
But the type of soil in your garden can have an enormous effect on the moisture content and you only really get to understand this by observing the garden over time. And if nature can’t provide enough rain, you’ll need to figure out how to keep the water in the soil using a mulch or how to get water to your plants (I’ll talk about watering later).
Where you’ll spend time in the garden – If you have a bench or walkways in your garden, then you’ll very naturally spend more time there and spot problems or quick plant maintenance tasks on nearby plants. Plants that don’t need much attending too can be tucked away in a corner.
But as well considering what you can do for you garden, don’t forget what your garden can do for you. Make some seating areas that let you enjoy your garden and feel proud at what you’ve accomplished. You’ve done most of the hard-work in the first half of the year, sit & enjoy the pay-off in the second half.
Providing Plants With Support
While root crops like carrots grow entirely under the ground and salads like lettuce sit close to the soil surface, taller vining plants like tomatoes can benefit from support to keep them growing upright in high winds and stop them collapsing when their fruits become too heavy.
Commonly this is done by staking the plant – using a pole or a bamboo stake – and tying the plant’s stem to the support. But you might also see metal or plastic cages used to support the heaviest plants. Crops like peppers, aubergines (eggplant), broad beans (fava beans) and sunflowers can benefit from staking.
Another common way to support crops is to grow the stems around a piece of twine connected to an overhanging beam or pole, up a trellis or fence or training a plant to grow across or up a structure. This is called vertical gardening.
Vertical gardening is a great way of increasing your effective growing space and reducing potential disease issues with your plants. By growing vertically you reduce the horizontal footprint of your plants and allow more airflow between them, eliminating pest problems and making maintenance much easier.
Some vining plants like squashes and pumpkins produce small tendrils to support themselves and can be trained to grow vertically up a trellis. But for crops like peas and runner beans, growing vertically is a necessity.
I like to grow my tomatoes with bungee cords attached to very thick bamboo poles. Weaker materials tend to break later in the season as the plants become heavier, so plan ahead!
Feeding The Soil Organically
During the post-war period, agriculturalists decided that if they add a certain amount of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (N-P-K) they can provide all the food the plants need and grow more crops faster than ever before.
The problem is that there are a lot of other micronutrients that plants need and their ability to uptake all nutrients is dependent on the biology living around the roots. By applying strong chemicals to soil, the insect and microbial life (including the mycorrhizal fungi) is burned, meaning the food produced by those plants becomes less nutritionally rich, soils degrade and lose organic matter over time and a chemical-dependency cycle is created.
The organic approach is to instead add organic matter like compost, manure, leaf mulch to the soil. N-P-K are added to the soil in concentrations that are non-destructive and micronutrients are available in a material form that plants, worms and micro-organisms can make use of.
This biologically-sensitive approach also helps the soil stay more aerated and structured underneath the ground so that water and air can move through the soil faster which means the soil becomes both more drought resistant and less prone to waterlogging and flooding. It also adds carbon back into the soil. All of this makes it a better and easier environment to grow plants.
If you take a no-dig approach, then adding compost on top of the cardboard every one or two years is all the work you need to do to support your plants.
Catering For The Pollinators
As well as the soil life supporting your vegetable plants, the insects and pollinators help your plants to form fruits and to fight off pests like aphids. Therefore we should try to care for them too.
One way of doing this is to grow plants that attract, provide habitat for and feed pollinators and beneficial insects and there are a few popular approaches to this.
Growing companion plants like marigolds and nasturtiums next to your crops can help bring the pollinators directly to your plants. They can also act as decoy or sacrificial plants, mis-directing pests away from your crops. Many common companions are also edible, which means you’re still technically growing food.
Creating a dedicated wildflower meadow or a floral display nearby serves a similar purpose, except that you can grow a much wider variety of native plants and create a diverse mini-ecosystem in your garden. Some wildflowers like borage are teeming with nectar — they can fully re-stock each and every day — making them a sweet treat for the bees.
Creating bee and insect hotels can be an effective way of providing habitat for beneficial insects including pollinators. Solitary bees will nest in the ends of bamboo poles and others will create a nest in the ground within a lawn if it isn’t too short or too unwieldy. Having a chemical free and a diverse, messy, imperfect garden is a good starting point.
Controlling Pests Organically
We want to grow organic food which means we aren’t going to be applying chemical pesticides (including dish soap) to tackle insects and fungal disease. There are organic alternatives, although what’s deemed organic and their legality varies by country, but we might not even want to apply any sprays at all.
I don’t apply any pesticide to my garden and, instead, my pest control is entirely passive. Nothing gets killed, my soil is protected and my food remains chemical free.
Growing companion plants is one way of preventing pests from attacking your crop plants, but you can also look at adding barriers to prevent pests from reaching your plant.
Covering brassicas with netting will prevent moths from being able to lay eggs on your plants. Putting up vertical barriers like a short fence or mesh will prevent rabbits or cats from getting in your veg patch. Keeping your plants pruned and allowing airflow will reduce fungal issues including blight. And growing carrots in containers at least half a metre tall will prevent carrot fly from destroying your crop (because despite the name they are terrible fliers).
Slugs are much harder to stop and, in the video above, I tested several barrier methods for stopping slugs including copper, wool, dematiaceous earth, coffee, perlite and eggshells and the results were very mixed. Perlite worked better when it was dry and copper had a limited effect but some of the others might not be worth your money.
But A big part of organic gardening is accepting that you will have more losses. I think that is a fair price to pay to support the ecosystem in your garden and to avoid eating chemical-laden food.
And after a couple of years you’ll have a diverse enough eco-system that other insects and predators will keep the problem-pest numbers in check. This is the goal: A balanced and healthy ecosystem; resilience without knee-jerk chemical treatments.
Watering Your Vegetable Garden
Your plants are in the ground, now adequately defended against pests and fed by the organic matter that you dug in or directly planted into. It’s now all down to the plant to grow until it produces a crop. You just need to make sure it doesn’t have to compete with other plants by staying on top of weeds and you need to make sure that they don’t run out of water.
The simplest way of doing this is to buy a watering can and to water plant when the soil starts to become dry. You can push your finger in the soil or buy a moisture meter to test but plants in the ground can go several days, sometimes a week without water.
However plants in containers will need watering every day. In the experiment above, I put some soil in a 5 litre bowl and found that the bowl would lose about 500 ml of water in 24 hours. But you can add a mulch material like grass clippings to pots or onto the soil to drastically reduce how much water is lost.
And there are other ways of making watering less cumbersome. You can use sprinklers connected to automatic timers to cover quite large areas effortlessly. However getting water on the leaves can invite fungal issues and cause other problems, so I recommend you take a different approach and try soaker hoses.
Harvesting Food
In a few weeks or a few months time (depending on the crop), you should have some large plants that are laden with full, ripe, delicious fruits, some healthy bulbs waiting to be pulled up or young leaves and flowers ready to pick and eat.
You can eat and cook this food fresh, instead of buying it from the supermarket – saving you money and increasing shelf-life in your pantry (supermarkets are a con). But you can also try preserving food and making your own tinned or canned food. Alternatively you could freeze dry and store in jars, which is a particularly effective way of processing herbs, or you could put what you grow in the freezer for later.
But the veg growing journey doesn’t end after harvesting…
Composting
Any waste plant material or any food scraps should be treated like green gold. It’s all valuable organic matter than can be used to add nutrients back into the soil next year.
There are many ways of composting and it is often said that composting is an art form. If you take the naïve approach (like I do) and put organic matter in a compost heap for long enough, turning it occasionally, you will get a perfectly good soil amendment.
But you can also get the perfect ratio of woody carbon-rich inputs to leafy nitrogen-rich inputs, master how to structure your heap to increase the composting temperature at the core and produce it faster, and there are other ways of managing moisture levels and airflow to ensure efficient production.
These instructions on composting from Charles Dowding are a good starting point.
Planning For The Next Growing Season
And now you’ve had a full year of growing, you’ll be able to get a head start (and save money) on next year’s season.
By saving seeds from the food you eat, you can avoid buying expensive seed packets. If you grow traditional heirloom varieties, the plant will grow the same each year but if you save hybrid seeds this may not be the case. The food will still be edible but the shape, taste and texture can’t be guaranteed because the genetics haven’t stabilised between generations.
You can also start planting biennials and winter bulbs including garlic in the autumn. These plants are hardy enough to survive the winter and, in some cases, prefer or need the extra time during the cold weather for best results.
And as the days get darker and colder and you (very naturally) retreat indoors, you’ll be able to sit down and start planning out next year’s veg garden.
Happy Gardening!
Nice article and informative.
Thank you