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Five easy vegetables for first-year gardeners

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tomato
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1Tomato

The most-grown home vegetable there is, and forgiving in the sense that a mediocre plant still hands you fruit — pick a disease-resistant variety and you've forgiven yourself the one mistake beginners make most, planting whatever looked good at the store. Stake or cage it early; an unstaked tomato rests its fruit on wet soil and rots from the bottom up.

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2Pepper

Plant a bell pepper transplant in mid-May and it does the same trick as a tomato at a smaller scale — stake it once the fruit gets heavy, and let the ones you don't pick turn from green to red on the plant, which is the same pepper, sweeter.

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3Green beans

Sow them straight into the ground — no starting indoors, no transplant shock. Stagger a new row every two weeks from mid-May into late June and you're picking pencil-thick pods from late July clear into September instead of getting them all at once.

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4Potato

Plant a cut seed piece four inches deep and walk away. Dig some early as small "new" potatoes if you can't wait, or leave the rest until the tops brown and die back in late summer, then cure them somewhere warm and ventilated so the skin toughens for storage.

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5Zucchini

One or two plants will outproduce a family, which is the whole joke about leaving bags of it on neighbours' porches. It isn't foolproof — squash bugs and the vine borer can take a plant down fast, and lots of flowers with no fruit early on is just the plant making male flowers first, not a failure. The trick that actually matters: pick them small, every couple of days, because a zucchini the size of a baseball bat is mostly seeds.

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