Ben Picks Ten: Top Seeds for New Gardeners.

Our friend Ben was fascinated to receive an e-mail from the Park Seed Co. (www.parkseed.com) titled “Top 10 Seeds for New Gardeners.” What an interesting idea! Our friend Ben thought some of Park’s choices were inspired, some less so. But they certainly inspired me to start thinking of a “Top 10″ list of my own. If I were recommending seeds to new gardeners, I’d choose ones that would grow well when direct-seeded in a garden bed, as opposed to seeds that had to be started indoors and then transplanted. And of course I’d cheat a little. So here’s my list. What’s yours?

1. Arugula. Fabulous, easy, foolproof from seed. Sow it right in the garden and get ready for a delicious harvest! Let a few plants go to seed and you’ll have arugula again in the fall and next year, too.

2. Mixed lettuces. There are so many mesclun and mixed lettuce seed packs on the market that you can take your pick. Sow them and stand back! Take your pick from the many, many selections, and harvest young for baby greens, or thin those babies (adding thinnings to your salads) and let some of them mature for future salads. Some lettuce mixes are blended for color and flavor, others for cold or hot weather. (Lettuce is naturally a cool-season crop, so if you’re planting it for summer eating or live in a hot-weather climate, be sure you choose a heat-tolerant mix.)

3. Radishes. Our friend Ben suggests starting with ‘French Breakfast’ radishes, but ‘Easter Egg II’ or any other radish is fine, too. Radishes are easy and early from seed, freeing the space for a later crop. 

4. Snap peas. Oh yes, snap peas are some of the drop-dead easiest and most delicious of all crops to grow. Choose one (and no, it doesn’t have to be ‘Sugar Snap’; keep trying varieties until you find your fave, though I’ll confess, I like ‘em all), stick those dried peas in the ground, put a wire trellis behind the row, water, and voila!

5. Onion sets. I said I was going to cheat, now, didn’t I? Onion sets are so satisfying and foolproof, no veggie garden should be without them. Push them in the soil, water once in a while, and harvest your onions in August. How easy is that?!

6. Seed potatoes. Okay, while I’m cheating, how about seed potatoes, another totally foolproof crop. We want success here, right? Plant your seed potatoes (which are really just small potatoes) whole, or cut them into chunks with two or three “eyes” (aka buds, sprouts) each, let them dry out for a couple of days, and plant. You can either put them in the ground or just lay them on top of prepared soil, cover them with straw, water them, and wait. Either way, come fall, you’ll have a bumper crop when you pull the soil or straw away and start digging.

7. Bush beans. If you plant beans in cold, wet soil, you won’t think they’re an easy crop, since the big bean seeds will just rot instead of sprouting. Wait ’til the soil warms, then go for it! One great thing about bean seeds being big is that it’s easy to see where you’re putting them when you plant them, so you can plant a tidy row, a square-foot garden, a zigzag pattern, or whatever takes your fancy. All bush beans are easy to grow, but my favorites are yellow wax beans and the heirloom variety ‘Dragon Tongue’ with its big, wonderful, purple-splashed pale yellow pods. Fun bean fact: Beans “fix” nitrogen in their roots, which means they trap this essential nutrient in nodules so it becomes available to them and, when the roots break down in the soil later, to future crops. Yay, free fertilizer! You can help this process along if you get a bag of powdered inoculant when you buy your beans and powder the seeds with it before planting, following the package directions. (Be sure to buy inoculant that’s specifically for beans for best results.) But you don’t have to take this extra step to enjoy your crop.

8. Bush summer squash. Our friend Ben takes it as a rule that if something volunteers in my compost pile, it’s easy to grow from seed. Squash certainly fits that bill! We most often get huge, rambling winter squash vines spilling over the sides of our bins, but if you’re a beginning gardener, you don’t have that kind of space to give to just one crop. (Actually, we don’t, either, which is why we tend to leave our vines where they grow rather than trying to grow them in one of our veggie beds.) Instead, grow some bush summer squash, which are easy, compact, and prolific. We love ‘Golden Zucchini’ and the yellow crookneck or straightneck kinds best, but there are plenty of fun squash to try. Big seeds make these easy to plant, too. (Wait for warm soil! Squash are heat-loving plants.) Just remember that word “prolific” when you’re planting. Just one or two plants will yield enough, say, zucchini for two people, unless you freeze it or bake tons of zucchini bread. Rather than planting a whole row, plant one or two plants of a couple of different varieties, harvest the young squash regularly so the plants will keep producing, and enjoy! 

9. Cherry tomatoes. Okay, I know you wanted me to say tomatoes. And it’s true, tomatoes are another reliable volunteer in our compost bins. But if you don’t live in a very warm climate where your growing season heats up early, you can’t really direct-seed tomatoes in your garden and expect to harvest any before the end of summer. That’s why most gardeners either buy tomato transplants or start the plants indoors under lights, then move them to the garden after the soil warms up. But if you want to have some fun and try it anyway, choose cherry tomatoes. They’ll thrive, and once they start bearing, they’ll keep on producing tons of little tomatoes through fall, until frost finally gets them. Our favorite cherry tomato is the hybrid ‘Sungold’, with incredibly flavorful round orange fruits. But we also love the old heirloom varieties like ‘Yellow Pear’ and ‘Yellow Plum’, and there are plenty of great red cherries, too. If you plant an open-pollinated variety (one that’s not a hybrid), and leave some of the tomatoes in the garden, you too will have volunteers next year!

10. Marigolds. Yikes, I’m forgetting flowers! Park’s featured both marigolds and morning glories in its list, and our friend Ben thinks they’re both fine choices. But since morning glories are vining plants that need a post, trellis, or other support, I’ll stick to marigolds here. Unfortunately, the seeds are dark and skinny, so they tend to vanish when you sow them, blending into the soil. I suggest scattering the seed where you want the plants to grow, then thinning them once they’re up and growing. If you carefully dig out the “extra” plants when they’re just an inch or so tall, you can transplant them to other areas around the garden. Our friend Ben loves the smell of marigolds, and they add such a cheery touch to a vegetable garden! Silence Dogood and I are partial to ‘Queen Sophia’, the red-and-yellow-striped heirloom variety ‘Harlequin’, and the mini-flowered French varieties like ‘Lemon Gem’. But there are thousands to choose from, so pick your own favorites or try a mix.

Fellow gardeners, what do you recommend as foolproof seeds for beginners? Let us hear from you!