Tips to start a garden from scratch for beginners

1. Choose a Location:

Pick a spot that gets the most sun throughout the day — most fruits and vegetables need 6 or more hours of direct sunlight, though some plants and herbs do fine in partial shade. In Switzerland, the southwest side of a plot (and most balconies) is typically set aside for gardening, making the most of a colder climate’s sunny days.

2. Plan Your Garden:

Once the location is set, think about which gardening style suits best. A no-dig garden, alongside permaculture, is easy to start with minimal effort and a great option for beginners. Container gardening works well for small city spaces, though not every vegetable thrives in a pot. Raised beds offer lower maintenance and some slug deterrence, but need more watering since they’re cut off from ground moisture, and the cost of good soil to fill them adds up — a couple are kept here just for the herb garden.

3. Decide What You Want to Grow:

Grow what the family actually loves to eat. Some tropical vegetables need a greenhouse to really thrive. In a shorter growing season, starting some plants indoors gives them a head start, though spring weather can be unpredictable, so timing the move outside matters — this also helps get an earlier harvest in before the first autumn frost.

4. Garden Tools:

Start small with basic tools and build up as needed, investing in good quality where it counts, and renting specialty tools for one-off jobs rather than buying them outright.

5. Test Your Soil:

Knowing whether soil is acidic or alkaline (a pH of 7.0 is neutral) matters, since different plants thrive in different conditions. Blueberry bushes planted in the wrong patch here never produced fleshy berries, since blueberries need quite acidic soil — covering the soil around the bushes with acidic mulch before their winter dormancy made a real difference, with a noticeably better yield the following year.

6. Prepare the Soil:

Clear grass, old roots, and stems before building mulch beds — doing this in autumn gives the soil time to enrich itself. Following a no-dig method here means bringing in a full load of organic mulch every year and spreading it across all the beds, an investment that pays off in yield and flavor.

7. Start the Seeds:

Some vegetables — carrots, beetroot, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins, beans, peas, lettuce, and kale — go straight into the ground. Others that need more warmth and sunlight, like tomatoes, peppers, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli, get started indoors under infra-red light using seed blockers, ready for transplanting 4 to 6 weeks later. Plenty of heirloom varieties get grown this way too. Seedlings need enough light and water at this stage, without being overwatered.

8. Plant the Seeds and Seedlings:

Follow the seed packet’s instructions, planting roughly 3 times as deep as the seed’s diameter unless stated otherwise. Most seedlings go in at the same depth they grew in their pot, though tomatoes go in a bit deeper. Waiting until after Easter helps avoid frost for heat-loving plants like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, and okra. Young plants are more vulnerable than older ones, especially to slugs, so a slug cap or some extra hardening off helps protect them once they’re outside. Crop rotation matters too — growing the same thing in the same patch every year isn’t a good habit.

9. Water Optimally:

On hot, dry days, watering twice — early morning and late evening — makes sense, since the ground can’t hold enough moisture otherwise. Cucumbers and squash need particularly deep watering rather than just a surface pass. Tomatoes need indirect watering, since wetting them directly encourages fungus — terracotta pots placed close to the plants have worked well here for slowly watering the roots instead.

10. Harvesting:

After all that work, harvest is the reward. A well-planned garden can even provide a harvest through the winter months. Since growing seasons run short in colder climates, harvest day often brings more of one vegetable than can be eaten fresh — which is where storing, canning, fermenting, and drying skills come in handy, letting the harvest be enjoyed in a jar well into the colder months.