Learn which fast-growing vegetables can grow now in early spring and help you get a quick win in the garden and start building your confidence with your gardening skills.
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Fast Growing Vegetables
I know as a new gardener you might be wondering what to start planting and when to start planting. One of my best friends is starting her garden for the first time this year and she’s just dying to get out there and plant everything! Or you might be one of those gardeners looking at bare soil wondering how to make it look a bit better to stop the neighbors twittering about the mess. I hear you!
Instant Garden Tip
Now I’m going to start you off with a quick tip for quick veggies. If you have the money, then visit your local nursery or garden center for some starter plants or transplants. You are looking for healthy plants that are not yellowing or have funny colored spots on the leaves. If you carefully take a plant out of the tray, there aren’t roots all in the container with no soil. If it is, that plant is root-bound and is stressing out! The roots themselves are creamy white in color.
There shouldn’t be any green moss or algae growing on the soil of the plant and definitely no fuzzy white moldy stuff. If there is, give those plants a miss.
Transplants are great for a super-fast garden because they are already growing. Plant them out into the garden bed, add some mulch, and voila! You have a garden!
Focus On Cold Tolerant
Spring is a weird time of year, frosts are still clinging on, rain can put a damper on some of your homestead activities and you might even still be getting flurries of snow! At this time of year, stick with the brassica family of plants if you are not yet past your last frost date. I’m talking about cabbage, kale, and cauliflower those types of plants. These can take a bit of frosty weather.
So let’s start with those brassica crops because even if you are a few weeks from your last frost date, you can sow cabbages and kale under a floating row cover or frost protection like a hoop house as far out as 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost in spring.
My favorite cabbages to grow are Golden Acre and Greyhound for early cabbages that make delicious sauerkraut by the way.
Ok kale favorites. I’ll be honest, I freaking love kale. When I grow kale it reminds me of my favorite old aunt who I love very much! She and my uncle grew curly kale like the Scotch Curly kale or Vates Blue Curled kale. Some of my favorite kales to grow are Red Russian or Ragged Jack since it is really tolerant of cold weather, Cavolo Nero or Dinosaur kale, and the Vates Blue Curled. Vates does quite well even as the temperature ramps up so that would be a good one for you if you are in the Southern states of the US.
Planting Cabbages and Kale
Since they need room to grow, space your seeds 18 to 24 inches apart. I know that seems like a lot of space but bear with me a moment. You can sow closer but then you need to thin out the plants or remove those seedlings growing so you have your cabbages or kale 18 to 24 inches apart or you can use the space to grow something else that grows low to the ground and acts as a mulch. Clover is a great cover crop that will add nitrogen to the soil feeding your cabbages and kale but it isn’t edible for you the gardener so how about lettuce instead?
Lettuces
Learning to grow more food in the space you have is a skill that you will get better at over time. The flatter, loose-leaf, cut and come again style lettuces work really well for interplanting with cabbage. Varieties like Black Seeded Simpson, Bronze Arrow, Deer Tongue, Vulcan, and Hyper Red Rumple Waved are ideal.
You can make several baby leaf lettuce harvests as your cabbages or kales are getting established and when the lettuces start to bolt or send up that flower stalk you can pull them out and add to the compost heap and give your cabbages and kales a nice load of compost and some mulch. Or you can leave a few lettuces in the garden bed for seed saving.
Lettuces for baby leaf salads can be ready to harvest in under 60 days making them a fast spring vegetable for you to grow.
Radish
The speediest of vegetables to grow is the humble radish. Some are ready to harvest in less than 30 days! I’ve had many a radish top salad in my youth as well as snacking on the radish roots. I can still remember my sister and I at big granny and grandad’s house eating fresh radishes from the garden. Even the taste I remember! Radishes are a fond vegetable since they were what my grandad taught me to sow from seed when I was little. I can’t stand the ones in the grocery store mind you. But a fresh French Breakfast or Cherry Belle radish, now we’re talking!
Radishes are part of the brassica family so they can tolerate the cooler weather in spring. Sow the seeds 2-4 inches apart directly in the garden bed. They do not grow very well if they are transplanted so save the headache and sow them straight in your garden instead.
Beetroot
Beetroots or beets are next on the list, they’re dark green leaves with the red ribs look striking in the early spring vegetable garden. Sow seeds up to 4 weeks before the last frost in spring under some frost protection and sow seeds about 5 inches apart.
Remove the weaker-looking seedlings with some scissors and snip the seedling at the soil level. Leave the strongest looking seedling to grow into a beet. Now you have a fancy microgreen salad of your thinnings! Perfect in pita bread with hummus or make an egg sandwich a little classy with the microgreen thinnings and a bit of mustard.
Learn how to grow beets in this post
Best Beets
Beets need even moisture so mulch the garden bed well with compost and mulch, I use straw or fall leaves as a mulch. There’s plenty of beet varieties to choose from, the Bulls Blood is a favorite with us, the red leaves can go into a salad when they are small but there are also beet varieties that are grown for their leaves like Red Devil and Macgregor’s Favorite. I like Macgregor’s Favorite for the roots too because they keep well for me in the fridge and roast up well.
Golden beets are a beautiful yellow variety as are Touchstone Gold and I also love the red and white stripy Chioggia but my favorite beets are Early Wonder and Detroit Dark Red.
Swiss Chard
Swiss chard is also part of the beet family and is one vegetable that people seem to coo over when they see it growing in the vegetable garden. Oooh your garden looks lovely they say when they see bright-green leaves and beautifully colored stems that really make the garden pop.
Learn how to grow Swiss Chard from seed in this post
I love growing Vulcan which is a red-stemmed variety. I also like the muted pastel shades of the Five Color Silverbeet varieties. But varieties of Swiss Chard span from white stems to yellow, orange, pink, and red so there’s a variety for you to try for sure!
Sow Swiss chard seeds about 18 inches apart because they get big fast. Swiss chard is like a beet and will grow a bunch of seedlings out of the one seed so grab your trusty scissors and snip the weaker-looking seedlings to leave the strongest one there to grow. You can use the thinnings as microgreens too!
Peas
So this wouldn’t be a chat about quick spring veggies if I didn’t mention peas. Peas love cool weather and grow really well in early spring. When the temperatures get hotter, peas die off.
Sow peas around 2 to 4 weeks before your last spring frost date and for a few weeks after the spring frost date for a successional harvest. Sow peas about 3 inches apart and provide some trellis or twiggy sticks as a trellis for them to grow up.
Peas to Grow
Sugar Ann peas are ones that I never get to enjoy because my hubby snaffles them before I get a chance but they are a good sugar snap pea variety. Joke’s on him this year because I’m growing shelling peas like the purple podded King Tut which is amazingly productive by the way and Cumpas which is also a good drying pea for soup.
My friends in the Southern States tell me that the Oregon Sugar Pod II is an exceptional producer for them from February before the heat sets in so if you are tuning in from the deep south, consider those for your first garden. I’m obviously a sucker for the English pea varieties for nostalgia so I do like to grow Green Arrow. However, Tall Telephone, Progress No. 9, Alderman, and Kelvedon Wonder are other varieties that grow well.
These peas freshly shelled and steamed with a sprig of mint are a spring favorite in the UK. Alderman is one I keep looking for because it is a Victorian variety that produces heavy crops with big pods so if you see it here in the US, let me know! Wando is a good shelling pea for the south and Little Marvel Dwarf Shelling Pea is a dependable variety to grow here in the US.
Growing Tip
Birds love the pea leaves growing so this year, I’m going to be hanging old CDs around the pea plants to deter the birds and put bird feeders in another area of the garden to distract them away from the peas. I’m sure they will feel the same about the Spice Girls and other childhood favorites and keep away.
What’s your favorite fast-growing vegetable to grow? Let me know in the Facebook group.
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