Heather Rodino - Veg Out: A Stress-Free Guide to Creating Your First Vegetable Garden

A vegetable garden is meant to be eaten. This simple truth can be easy to lose sight of in the course of the planning, digging, transplanting, watering, weeding, and mulching that are an inevitable part of the gardening process.

Unlike growing houseplants or other ornamental plants, this is a practical sort of gardening. But dont let the word practical put you off. Theres just as much pleasure in it, maybe even more, because of the wonder in both the process and the product. The products of your garden will enrich your cooking, fuel and strengthen your body, and surprise your taste buds. If you love food, youll find that nothing tastes as good as the literal fruits of your labor. Youre feeding yourself and the ones you love, and along the way, youre experiencing the joy of tending and watching something grow. Theres something special about that.

Your vegetable garden can be anything you like. It will most likely be a supplement to what you buy, but you may also wish, ambitiously, to grow everything you eat. Its a worthy goal, but dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Ive found that with many things in life, its best to start small, and the garden is definitely one of those things.

Some of my most indelible childhood memories involve the garden. When I was growing up, my mom kept a huge plot, and I had my own small garden within it. I remember the intense odor of tomato plants as I brushed against their leaves and the feeling of squeezing through rows of sweet corn, taller than I was, to harvest the cobs, which wed then husk on the front porch over a stockpot, fighting with the cornsilk that stuck to everything. There were prickly raspberry bushes, their irritating qualities somehow intensified by the summer heat, and the sheer abundance of raspberry jam, frozen raspberries, raspberry bars, and so on, that made me grow tired of this favorite fruituntil one day, in early adulthood, I tasted a raspberry at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City and was transported back (yes, like Prousts madeleine), and began to love raspberries again. There were also dusky Concord grapes whose thick, tart skins and sweet, gelatinous interiors were nothing like what the supermarket considered a grape. Baked into crumb-topped pies, they were a symbol of the fall garden. Maybe you have similar memories or motivations for feeding yourself and your loved ones. Or maybe youre completely new to gardening. In either case, I hope this book helps you bring wonderful new flavors to your familys plates.

Your reason for starting a garden might be one of many: a desire to reduce your carbon footprint, a love of food or cooking, a craving for the freshest and tastiest ingredients, a way of increasing food security (especially in the wake of supply-chain issues or other disruptions), or as a hobby that takes you outside and away from lifes other stresses. Or all of the above. Here are some of the most popular reasons people are drawn to vegetable gardening.

Youve probably heard this so often, its become a clich, but its true: the food you grow tastes so much better than anything you can buy in a supermarket. Garden-fresh ingredients need little adornment. Think of a crunchy cucumber sprinkled with flaky salt, or a juicy tomato drizzled with a little olive oil and scattered with torn basil leaves, or crisp-tender green beans tossed in a Dijon vinaigrette.

Whether youre an omnivore, a vegetarian, or a vegan, we can all do better by eating more plants for our health and the health of the planet. When you have a garden, youll find that eating more plants is almost irresistible because you grew them yourself.

Gardening has been shown to have mental health benefits and is sometimes even prescribed for people with anxiety, PTSD, or depression. Plus, it helps you connect more with your communityafter all, youre going to have to give all that extra zucchini to someone. Why not the neighbor you usually only wave to?

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, seed sales skyrocketed, as first-time and veteran gardeners alike wanted to grow food at home because of supermarket shortages, supply-chain issues, or simply to limit trips out to reduce their risk of contracting the virus. At the time of this writing, while the virus moves toward becoming endemic, shortages persist, and inflation and other concerns are still motivating people to grow their own food.

Regardless of your own motivations for gardening, you cant beat the convenience of having the ingredients you need for that must-make recipe just a few steps away, saving you a trip to the store for a tiny, overpriced plastic packet of limp tarragon or faded thyme.

By gardening thoughtfully and organically, you can increase biodiversity in your own small but important way. Bees, beneficial insects, and other creatures will find their way to your garden. Ive included a few wildlife-attracting plants in the profiles.

This book will walk you through the steps of starting your first vegetable garden, from selecting a spot for your garden and navigating seed catalogs to dealing with pests and harvesting your first crops. Along the way, Ill offer easy-to-understand guidance to try to reduce any feelings of frustration or intimidation and to help you succeed. If youve read my last book, How to Houseplant, youll find that my goal is the same here: to streamline vegetable gardening so that you have the tools you need to get started and feel excited and empowered to do so, but not to overcomplicate the process and leave you feeling overwhelmed and drowning in information thats difficult to prioritize. Youll find that youll naturally graduate to the next level as your interest and experience grow, and youll learn how to troubleshoot and look for the answers you need. Remember that gardening is always a learning process.