Beginner’s Guide to Gardening

1. Start smaller than you want to

Every enthusiastic gardener plants too much in year one. A 4-by-8-foot bed — or five big containers — will teach you more, with far less weeding, than a quarter-acre of good intentions. You can always expand in July, when you know what you love.

2. Pick a site with sun and water

Most vegetables want six to eight hours of direct sun and a hose that actually reaches them. Watch your yard for a day, note where the light lingers, and put your first bed within sight of the kitchen door — gardens you see daily get tended daily.

3. Grow what you like to eat

Beginner-friendly crops that forgive mistakes: garlic (plant in fall, ignore until summer), bush beans, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, basil, and looseleaf lettuce. All of them are in our vegetable lineup, chosen for vigor, not fussiness.

4. Feed the soil, then the plants

Mix two inches of compost into the top six inches of soil before planting, then mulch with straw once seedlings are up. If your ground is tired, sow a cover crop in the off-season — it’s the cheapest soil improvement there is.

5. Keep a one-line journal

Variety, planting date, one note at harvest. That’s it. Next winter, those lines become your planting plan — and the reason year two always outgrows year one.