1. Planting Too Much Garden

For many beginners, starting a vegetable garden for the first time is like loading your plate up at a banquet when you’re starving. Everything looks and smells so good, but halfway through the meal, you remember your stomach can only hold so much.

Beginning gardeners are prone to planting too much garden. The best advice is to start small, with just a few plants of the vegetables you like most.

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A good beginner’s garden could have tomatoes, basil, peppers, eggplants, ONE zucchini or summer squash, onions, green beans, peas, a patch of carrots, beets, green onions, kale, Swiss chard, or some other leafy green, and maybe a cantaloupe. Skip anything you don’t like.

There are dozens of vegetables not mentioned here, but these basic vegetables are popular, and they’re good for beginners starting a vegetable garden because they’re easy to grow. See the list of vegetables on How to Grow Vegetables for information on growing specific vegetables.

If you have a lot of space, you could add a patch of corn, or a winter squash like ‘Bonbon’, a pumpkin, or a watermelon, but these last 3 all run very large—vines can reach 25 feet (8 meters).

Don’t take on a large area and a lot of plants until you’ve done a smaller garden, and know how much work is involved.