Seven Vegetables You Should Always Grow From Seed (and Why)
It’s so tempting to buy starts – I get it. It’s nice to look at the garden and finally see something in the beds that brings color back to the landscape. But before you buy, you should seriously consider growing the following vegetables from seeds. This may mean you have to wait a little longer, but the yield will likely be better.
Carrot
Carrot seeds are small and cheap. You can buy a packet of seeds at the grocery store for a few dollars and you’ll get a lot more carrots than several six-packs of carrots. It’s $14 to start versus $3 for a packet of seeds. Not to mention, when you buy carrot seeds, each cell contains a ton of individual carrot seedlings. You can’t just stick a whole cell of starts into the ground. You will have to carefully separate them and then plant each seedling in the ground, with space around it. It takes forever.
If you’re growing from seed, you simply draw a line in the ground with a gardening tool, scatter the seeds over it, and cover it lightly with soil. Water or let the rain do the work for you. Of course, you will have to thin out the seeds, but this is much easier.
Beetroot and radish
Both beets and radishes suffer from the same crowding problem as carrots, but there are two additional reasons to sow them yourself.
First, the seeds of beets and radishes are much larger and easier to handle than carrots. This way, it’s pretty easy to make sure you plant one beet or radish every few inches, and neither of them need to be buried deep—you can stick the seed into the ground with your finger. This means you won’t have to thin them out later, and beets and radishes will germinate easily.
Second, you don’t want 50 radishes or beets ready for harvest at the same time as every seedling in a six-pack will be ready. You need 10 or 15. By planting a few seeds weekly, you’ll have radishes or beets ready to harvest week after week.
Corn
Corn has unbearably shallow roots and is annoyingly tall. When you transplant corn, it will inevitably develop roots strong enough to stay upright and will need additional support. This is stupid because corn is a huge seed that has an incredibly high germination rate. It’s even better if you plant it late in the season, so you’re less likely to miss a beat.
Additionally, most nurseries only sell standard sweet yellow corn. With seeds you get access to more interesting varieties like Glass Gem or popcorn.
Beans
Beans, like corn, do not have very deep roots, and these roots must support either a large bushy plant or a tall climbing vine. For this reason, it is almost always better to plant from seed so that the seed has a chance to actually take root in place.
As with corn, you may have access to a very large number of wild and wonderful bean seeds while your nursery will offer a much smaller variety. In fact, you can try growing almost any bean that you buy at the store and really like. Some bean suppliers, such as Rancho Gordo, encourage this by allowing you to sign up to test grow their beans. For a shipping fee, they will send you seed beans every year.
Cucumbers
For years I bought cucumbers to get a head start on the season. And then my cucumbers didn’t do anything for the first few weeks, which always disappointed me. Meanwhile, I noticed that the cucumbers that had grown naturally from seeds left over from last year were growing profusely. This is because cucumbers don’t like their roots to be disturbed. When you transplant them, they go into shock and freeze for a few weeks. They will recover, but in these few weeks you might be able to grow shoots from the seeds.
Lettuce
If you want to eat lettuce all summer, you need to plant it all summer. Because lettuce seeds are so common and cheap, it’s much more efficient to grow your own. Lettuce is easy to sprout, and it makes sense to sprinkle seeds every week starting in spring. Let the rain do the hard work. Lettuce is great for growing in blocks in the garden or between other plants.