Growing vegetables is an incredibly rewarding experience. From picking out your favorite vegetable seeds to harvesting ripe produce at peak freshness, the entire vegetable growing cycle brings satisfaction. The tangible benefits of growing vegetables are numerous as well:

• You’ll eat the freshest produce available. No more going to the grocery store and seeing disappointing rows of wilted and browning greens. Just pop into your back yard and snip off lettuces, herbs, tomatoes, and more, all at the peak of freshness.

• You’ll reduce waste. Because you harvest only what you need for each meal, you’ll avoid having to buy more than you need and risk spoilage. Produce that stays in the ground stays fresh and ready for you to use it the next day, or for many vegetables, the next month!

• You’ll save money. Even with startup costs of creating your first garden, with the right seed selection, you’ll come out ahead the first year. Then, in subsequent years when startup costs are much lower, you’ll save significant amounts on produce each summer. See our blog post on the 2018 garden where we ate $700 worth of produce grown in our back yard!

• You won’t be reliant on a mysterious food chain. Don’t want to have to worry about where your lettuce came from the next time there is an E. Coli breakout? You can avoid all of this by growing your own produce. Just look out into your back yard to see your entire produce food chain.

• You can’t beat the taste! Produce picked and eaten right away is always going to taste better than produce held for days while being transported from a large farm to a grocery store. Just compare a store-bought tomato to a tomato picked 5 minutes ago and you’ll see!

If you have a yard that gets 6 or more hours of sunlight during the summer, you have everything you need to grow your own vegetables.

Just follow the simple steps below to get growing!