Start a Quick and Easy Food Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Bag gardening couldn’t be easier! Simply set out purchased bags of topsoil, cut them open, and plant seeds and seedlings right into the topsoil. The bag garden in this plan will be brimming with more than 20 vegetables and culinary herbs by its third year! ILLUSTRATION: KEITH WARD/JOHN GRUEN

If your yard has at least a 20-by-28-foot space that gets full or almost full sun, you can grow enough vegetables to have fresh food all season with surprisingly little effort. Go ahead and dig beds if you’re lucky enough to have naturally fertile, well-drained soil, but don’t let soil flaws stop you from starting a food garden. Instead, use this quick and simple bag gardening technique. This method is almost too easy to believe, but it absolutely works! Gardening in bags of topsoil lets you get a garden going today, and offers these additional benefits:

• In the course of a season, the topsoil bags will smother the grass underneath them, so you won’t have to dig up and remove the grass sod.

• The bags eliminate aggravation from seedling-killing cutworms, which are caterpillars commonly found in soil where lawn grass has been growing.

• Bag gardens have few (if any) weeds, because bagged soils and planting mixes are pasteurized to kill weed seeds.

• You can eventually gather up the plastic bags and dig their contents into permanent beds, or just lay down a new batch of bags.

What Can I Grow?

Whether you dig right in or start with bags, you can’t go wrong with the following selection of 25 easy-to-grow crops. In addition to plenty of fresh veggies to put on the table and to store, this garden plan will also produce a year’s supply of several tasty herbs, which will attract droves of pollinators and other beneficial insects.

If you’re new to food gardening, your biggest challenge may be planting crops at the right times. A food garden should be planted in phases, so that every crop gets the type of weather it prefers. The following season-by-season instructions for our easy food garden (download the plan) show how seasonal planting sequences work. You’ll also get a few labor-saving tips — such as letting pole beans twine up tall sunflowers.

Early Spring

1. Prepare your site. You can dig beds in the traditional way, or you can plant most of this garden in bags. If you’re using bags, you will need about 25 40-pound bags to cover the five main beds. See Bed 3 for guidance on how to arrange the bags when starting your garden. Definitely dig the squash bed and the circular bed, mixing in a 2-inch layer of good compost as you work.