A Primer for Getting Started

New to Gardening? Start Here!

Why garden?

Gardening is for everyone, regardless of whether you live in an apartment or on a 100 acre ranch. Gardening gets you out in the fresh air, adds positive energy into your life, gives you something fun to do, and gives a new activity that the whole family can participate in.

Through these unpredictable times, let's grow together.

You can grow fruits and vegetables in your landscaping.

Many popular vegetables don't use a lot of space and can be grown in the same place where you traditionally grow flowers and shrubs. Any available spot is a place where you can put a tomato, pepper, lettuce, spinach, onion, etc.

You can grow many vegetables in containers.

A pot on your porch or deck will grow most kinds of vegetables, as long as it gets sunlight, water and adequate fertilizer. The info linked from this page will tell you how.

Let's Garden

We have compiled a list of free resources on this page to help you get started gardening. We hope this information helps you get started gardening this year and our active community of members is here to help by answering any specific questions you have. Ask a question at this page.

Every resource provided by Garden.org through this page is completely free of charge.

Timing is everything

Cold weather, frost and freezing weather kills many vegetables, so you need to get a little information to help you know when the right time is to plant each different kind of vegetable you want to grow. Plug in your zipcode at our frost dates calendar to get a good view of when your region is free of freezes, and when you can safely plant all the different kinds of vegetables.

Who can you buy seeds and/or plants from?

Our "green pages" contains a list of all the ecommerce gardening companies that our members endorse. From that page you can select a category to view, like vegetable companies and seed companies.

If you are an absolute beginner to gardening

We have some excellent resources to help you learn how to garden. Our food gardening guide is a complete and series on everything you need to know for growing the most popular vegetables, herbs and fruits. It's basically a full tutorial/cheatsheet/howto on everything you need to know to grow your own food. Take advantage of this excellent resource! We also sell a complete e-book series on growing vegetables.

Teaching children about gardening

Gardening is an excellent activity for children, and is good for them. We have an extensive series of free gardening curriculum that you can go through by yourself or with your children to learn all about the details of how plants work. Our vegetable gardening course has taught thousands of new gardeners how to grow food since 1999, and is still as relevant today as it was back then.

Additional Resources from National Gardening Association

The garden.org website contains a vast collection of resources to help gardeners of every sort. Explore our learning library for articles about plant care, weeds, pests, Q&A, dictionaries, and more. Our detailed plants database is the largest in the world. We have many online tools such as gardening calculators, climate information, maps, group seed swaps, etc. We also have a searchable garden knowledgebase with thousands of Q&A that have been answered. If you would like to ask a gardening question and get answers from real gardeners, click here to ask your question.

Our discussion forums are active with thousands of gardeners discussing every aspect of growing plants.

Finally, we e-mail a weekly newsletter every Saturday morning. You will surely love it. Signup for that at this page here. View past newsletters here.

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