How to Grow Your Own Food – Best Gardening Growing Guide

By: Kris Bordessa, National Geographic author Updated: August 14, 2024

Starting a garden is a great step toward a more self-reliant lifestyle. There’s nothing more rewarding than planting food and watching it grow from seed to harvest. It’s such a joy to walk out to the vegetable garden for a snack or dinner ingredients. Starting a garden can also drastically reduce your grocery bill.

An essential vegetable planting guide on how to get started growing your own food. Save money, ensure food security, and get a good workout.

Growing fruits and vegetables in your backyard will give you greater peace of mind about the food you consume, too. After all, you’ll know exactly what goes into the produce you harvest from your garden.

Dreaming of starting a garden in your little corner of the world? Here’s what you need to know about planting food in your backyard. It’s not hard to grow a vegetable garden, but — especially for those who’ve never done it before — it can seem like a lot to learn. Yes and no.

At its most basic, growing food is simply a matter of sticking a seed in good soil, watering it, and watching it grow. There are a multitude of nuances, though. Many of those will depend upon your location and individual situation.

Here you’ll find a collection of articles that will help you learn more about planting a vegetable garden and growing your own food. It’s not a comprehensive list, and I’ll continue adding to it as time passes, but it’s a good starting place.

Preparing Garden Soil for Planting Vegetables

Whether you have a small container garden on the patio, a plot in the community gardens, or a square-foot garden raised bed, healthy soil will be a necessity. Yes, garden centers have bags of soil, but I encourage you to try the ideas I share below to try building your own soil—it’s definitely more self-reliant and it helps lower our carbon footprint, too!

Vegetable plants need nutrients, and those come from the soil or the regular addition of fertilizer. While some growers use commercial fertilizer, that increases costs and is not always natural. Homemade compost is my preferred way to fertilize with organic matter, and it’s essentially free.

Starting a garden begins with building good soil

Planting food crops that you intend to ingest means you’ll be especially concerned about what you put on your garden, so building quality soil is a good idea. Synthetic fertilizers aren’t exactly something I want on my dinner plate! Creating your own soil from leaves, weeds, and food waste is an easy first step to improving your garden space.

Best Backyard Vegetable Garden Ideas

Gardening of any kind is a great hobby—it gets you out in the fresh air and gets you moving. But I’m partial to vegetable gardening since I get the additional benefit of eating my own produce and possibly even making fewer trips to the grocery store! I have a lot of tips and information on how to grow your own vegetables that even new gardeners can do.

How to plant a vegetable garden

Of course, there’s no single correct way to plant a garden, so you’ll want to explore the options. From starting a garden in less-than-ideal conditions to figuring out the best way to net a big harvest, there’s a solution to your particular garden situation.

Plant food crops for a bountiful harvest

What you choose to grow will likely differ from what your neighbor grows, but starting a garden and growing food is a winning situation no matter what you plant. Consider your challenges in planting food: Is your space small? Climate dry? Time limited? You might find the solution here!

Vegetables to consider when starting a garden

There are so many vegetables (and fruits!) to consider when you start thinking about planting food crops. Start with your favorites! If tomatoes are a favorite, there’s nothing as satisfying as standing in the middle of your garden, snacking on fresh cherry tomatoes. Planting food crops that you love means you’ll find great value in starting a garden.

The next thing to consider: what vegetables do you find yourself buying a lot of? If you use a lot of peppers in your cooking, you can save a bundle by growing your own. Ditto tomatoes and zucchini. Skip planting vegetable crops that you simply don’t use much.

How to Grow Herbs

An herb garden is a great way to ease into gardening and can be done on a window sill or in small spaces, even filling in between other garden plants. If you’d like to add herbs to your garden plan, consider perennial herbs that will come back year after year. Here is a collection of great info for helping you plant and harvest herbs for culinary and medicinal uses.

Growing herbs for culinary flavor

Small Space Gardening Ideas

We don’t all have a large yard (or acreage!) in which to grow food. Making the most of the space we DO have is critical.

Indoor Gardening Ideas

For those without easy access to a garden space or for anyone wanting to eat more fresh produce in the off-season months, indoor gardening might be just the thing you need. Even without much space, some herbs and leafy greens can be grown in plant pots in a sunny spot, or even on a windowsill or on a balcony. I have lots of ideas to try your hand with indoor gardening!

Types of Indoor Gardening

If you’re limited on space or facing winter, consider growing some of your own food indoors.

Vertical Gardening Ideas

If you’re starting a garden in a tight spot, growing UP means you’ll need less surface space to produce a harvest. Vertical gardening can encompass a number of different methods for utilizing the vertical space in your yard.

How to grow a vertical garden

There are methods for growing just about any vegetable crop vertically. Hanging baskets, salad towers, and espaliered fruit trees are all ways of planting food for an abundant harvest no matter the size of your garden.

Plants for vertical gardening

Vining plants like cucumbers and peas are naturals for vertical gardening — they want to climb upwards — but I have some other ideas for how to get many plants growing up to save space.

Backyard Orchard Ideas

Planting food crops doesn’t have to be limited to a seasonal vegetable garden. Expand your options and try growing some of your own fruits in the backyard. Fruit trees have a lot to offer besides a crop of apples or peaches, though. They can be the focal point of your landscape, they provide shade, and the birds will appreciate the habitat.

Growing Fruit

Of course the best part of growing fruit trees in a home orchard is they will produce a crop every year without fail — and with very little maintenance.

Organic Pest Control for Plants

With a little bit of research and ingenuity, garden pests can often be controlled, eliminated, or out-foxed. I prefer organic methods because I just don’t want yucky stuff anywhere near what I plan to put in my mouth.

Natural pest control

Pests can be a problem when planting food crops but try to avoid resorting to harsh poisons. You don’t want that on your food.

Harvesting Garden Produce & Saving Seeds

Harvesting healthy food from your own garden is very satisfying! I have shared lots of tips and tricks for harvesting plants and saving seeds so you can do it all again next season.

When to harvest plants

Saving seeds from year to year and extending your harvests will save money in the long run.

How to Keep Your Garden Healthy

It might seem like there’s a lot of hard work involved in managing a garden well, but I promise it’s doable even for a new gardener, and so worth whatever time and energy is spent! One of the best ways to save time, money, and energy in the garden is to learn from others, and I think you’ll find some useful info that I share from my own experience.

Maintaining your garden with less work

Starting a garden is step one. Once you have it planted, you’ll need to care for the seedlings, protecting them from pest damage, keeping the weeds at bay, that sort of thing. Check out these gardening hacks and ideas for making the most of your gardening efforts.

Flower Garden Ideas

Not only are flowers great for mental health with their beauty and fragrance, but they also attract pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, and provide necessary nutrition for these helpers. I enjoy having flowers in the garden for these reasons, and it’s a bonus that some of them are even edible!

Growing flowers for beauty and pollination

Edible Gardening with Flowers

Many plants are edible plants, though it’s best to know for sure before munching down!

About the author: Kris Bordessa, National Geographic author Kris Bordessa is an award-winning National Geographic author and a certified Master Food Preserver. Read more about Kris and how she got started with this site here. If you want to send Kris a quick message, you can get in touch here.