What to grow in your first year

Walk into any garden centre in March and you'll find a wall of seed packets, each one beautiful, each one promising something extraordinary. At a few coins a packet, it's easy to lose track, so you fill your basket with twelve different lettuces, three kinds of squash, fennel, kohlrabi, purple mizuna, and a packet of something called celtuce because it sounds intriguing.

Three months later you have a glut of crops you've never cooked, no idea what to do with any of them, and a slightly bitter feeling about the whole enterprise.

Don't be that person. There are better ways to choose.

Grow what you'll actually eat

Before buying a single packet, think back over the last four weeks of your shopping. What did you cook often? What did you put in salads, in pasta, in stir-fries, on sandwiches? What would make you genuinely happy to walk into the garden and pick?

For most first-year gardeners, the honest answer is some combination of: salad leaves, tomatoes, radishes, courgettes, bush beans, a handful of herbs, and maybe carrots if your soil cooperates. It isn't a glamorous list. It's the list of things you'll actually use.

The test is simple: if a crop wouldn't make it onto your shopping list, don't bother growing it.

Grow what your climate can grow

The seed packet doesn't always tell you the whole story. Plenty of crops will technically germinate in a Northern European summer but won't reach a useful harvest before the days shorten and the nights cool — eggplant, watermelon, sweet peppers outdoors, the longest-season tomato varieties. Others, like spinach and most lettuces, will bolt the moment July gets warm.

Knowing what your particular climate can grow is half the battle, and it's the half nobody tells you about at the garden centre.

The Ortaia app handles this for you — it only suggests crops that work in your climate, and it tells you whether to grow them outdoors or in a greenhouse. In Denmark, for example, eggplant is greenhouse-only if you actually want to harvest any. The same logic applies anywhere: a crop that's standard in southern France can be a heartbreak in Copenhagen, and a crop that thrives in Scotland can be miserable in Madrid.

If you'd rather work it out yourself, the rule of thumb is: ask a local gardener. Whatever's growing well in a neighbour's garden will probably grow well in yours.

Plan an experiment

Once you've put the staples in, plan one small experiment — a climbing bean variety with purple pods, a striped tomato, a pumpkin, a melon, a chilli you've always wanted to try. Something that makes you curious. Just one.

It might fail. That's fine. An experiment you chose on purpose will give you more pleasure than any sensible crop you grew because you should.

What to skip in year one

A few crops are notoriously hard for beginners — long-season, fussy, or unforgiving — and the heartbreak of losing them isn't worth the lesson. Save these for year two or three:

Brussels sprouts. A nine-month season, very slug-prone, and they hate inconsistent watering.

Cauliflower. Fussy about temperature, prone to bolting, easy to end up with a head the size of a golf ball.

Celery. Impossibly thirsty and fiddly to blanch.

Parsnips. Slow to germinate (six weeks isn't unusual), long season, easy to give up on before they even emerge.

Aubergine, watermelon, sweet peppers outdoors in a cool-summer climate. They need heat and length-of-season most northern European gardens can't provide without a greenhouse.

There's no shame in waiting. The hard crops are still there next year, and you'll grow them better when you've learned the easy ones first.

The honest first-year list

A short list of crops that will reward a first-year gardener almost regardless of skill:

Salad leaves — cut-and-come-again mixes, rocket, lamb's lettuce

Radishes — four weeks from sowing to plate

Bush beans — productive, easy, satisfying

Courgettes — one or two plants, no more, you'll thank yourself

Cherry tomatoes — a single staked plant in a sunny spot

Herbs — parsley, chives, basil, mint (kept in a pot so the mint doesn't escape)

Spring onions — small space, fast results

One climbing thing for joy — a runner bean, a sweet pea, a passion pod

It doesn't take much space to grow real food. A bed roughly 1 metre wide by 4 metres long is enough for a list like this — with the courgette taking the lion's share of it. One growing season. By October you'll have eaten well, learned a lot, and be ready to expand into the harder stuff.

What's next

Once you've decided what to grow, the next question is where to actually find good seeds — because not all seed packets are created equal, and the most expensive one on the rack isn't always the best deal.

That's the next piece →.

Further reading

Royal Horticultural Society — Vegetables for beginners

Charles Dowding — Charles Dowding's Vegetable Course (Frances Lincoln, 2020). His chapter on choosing crops is gentle and realistic.

Joy Larkcom — Grow Your Own Vegetables (Frances Lincoln). The most reliable single reference for which crops behave well for new gardeners.

Garden Organic — Grow your own