6 Easy Plants to Grow in Your Spring Garden 🌷 🥔

Well, it's official. The first day of spring has passed. And with that comes some amazing recommendations to plant in your spring garden. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb in spring. I know a lot of us have started gardening in the past year, or maybe you thought about starting last year and now you're starting this year. Spring is here. You're freaking out. You don't really know what you should be planting. So in today's video, I want to go over some of the simplest and easiest plants that you can possibly grow in spring. So cultivate that Like button and I will boost your soil temperatures by about five degrees so you can start planting sooner. And let's get into the video. The first crop I have for you are peas. You can see this beautiful wall of peas hanging out right here. Now they're so simple because they just love the temperatures of spring and even fall. You can grow them in the fall as well. When it comes to peas, you want to just sow them direct if you can, if you can afford to. But what I actually like to do personally is I transplant them. So the pea seeds are quite large. You can soak them if you want to. It does speed germination up a little bit. It's really not a huge deal in my experience to do that. I've noticed if I transplant they'll germinate probably twice as fast because they're in just a generally more warm environment. And then they transplant completely fine. These were transplanted. And as you can see, we're starting to see some early flowers and we'll have some pods pretty soon. In the spring, I really like a snow pea. There's a bunch of different varieties of peas that you can grow. For me, snow peas are my absolute favorite. If you're looking for some fun varieties of peas, I recommend Mammoth Melting Snow Pea. You've got Oregon Sugar 2 and you've got Snow Giant. All of these are snow peas that will do really, really well. With peas, I would say six to eight hours of direct sun. They can tolerate a little bit of shade. But really the secret to growing peas is you have to give them something to climb up. As you can see, I've got this makeshift trellis here. And I'm going to show you one in just a second that I made straight out of bamboo for about $5 or so that works extremely well. So right over here, I've got a bamboo teepee trellis, probably the biggest one I've made. I think there's about 12 or 13 stakes that I just lashed together. So you want to take some bamboo and you can just go over, under, over, under, go back and forth a few times and then twirl over each connection point. And you've got a beautiful lashing, which I'll show you in just a second. But that really is the key to growing peas. Even moisture in the soil, give them something to climb up. You can do it in a variety of ways. This is a really cheap and easy one. And then from there you don't have to do a whole lot. They don't need a ton of fertilizer. Specifically they don't need a lot of nitrogen fertilizer. They're a quick growing crop. So most of the fertilizer that you're going to be putting in is just how you prepare the soil in the first place. And then the final thing I'll say, some people do experience success with a inoculant for their peas because peas are a nitrogen fixing plant. They actually need bacteria in the rhizosphere, which is the root area to partner up with to actually steal nitrogen out of the air and affix it in the soil in these nodules. And so if you don't have that bacteria in the soil, some people will experience success with using an inoculant. Personally, I've done it once and I've not done it dozens of times and my peas have come out the same both times. And so I don't do it, but it might work for you. Our next crop on the list for you is spinach, the Popeye crop. Actually a crop I really liked to eat as a kid. My mom used to, I think boil it maybe and put butter and salt on it, which is probably why I liked it. But nevertheless, it really is a fantastic spring and fall crop. It's one of the better cool weather greens that you can grow. So you can actually start it before the ground is workable if you start it indoors and then transplant it in and you can push it into the frost in fall as well. It doesn't like temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So as you can imagine, again, a great spring crop. Now what you need to know about spinach is there's two sort of major varieties. You have your Savoy style where the leaves are a little bit curled and then you have your flat leaf varieties where they're not. Now this one here is actually a hybrid of the two. This is Carmel spinach. I also have Okame spinach. But there are some classic varieties in both of those categories. So you got Bloomsdale spinach. That's a really great one. The thing to know really about spinach is keeping those temperatures cool, keeping that soil cool. Cause what it'll do is it'll do what's called bolting and it'll just come up. Think that its life is over. And what happens is you've got that flower stalk that starts to come up and then the leaves start to bitter out and the lifespan is just decreased. So you want to give it about six hours of direct sun a day. It can tolerate a little bit of shade, especially in those hotter parts of the day, like the afternoon, late afternoon. So if you have a little dappled area, that'll be a great spot for spinach. It's really a quite simple green. Other than that, you don't need to do a whole lot in the way of fertilization. Maybe you could throw a little chicken manure top dressed around the sides. But a lot of these leafy greens, they don't need a ton of fertilizer because they're such a quick season crop that by the time it would need the fertilizer, it's probably time to start harvesting it. And then you can just amend the soil and plant in. And that is your fertility for that section of your bed. While you knew this one was coming, potatoes are my third crop I recommend for a spring planting. This is one of the simplest crops you can grow that actually produces a substantial amount of calories. In fact, so much so that I grew about a hundred pounds of them and tried to live off them for a month in 2019, amongst some other things. There's actually quite a fun video that I made about that. But with potatoes, I've grown them in just about every technique possible. This is the newest technique that I'm trying in ground here in a modified Ruth Stout method, which basically means drop the potato on the ground, into a little trench, cover it with hay and forget about it. So I'm going more and more towards lower effort potatoes. But if you're a small space gardener, don't fear, you can still grow potatoes. I recommend either a five gallon bucket where you drill some drainage holes in it. Or my personal favorite, because it already has the drainage built into it, are grow bags. So a 15 gallon grow bag, minimum in my opinion for potatoes, about three seed potatoes per bag or one seed potato per five gallons of container space. So I find that the 15 gallons work fantastically for that. If you are growing potatoes in grow bags, what's really nice about them is you can actually just fold these sides down while you're growing them. Because if you don't know how to grow potatoes, what you would do is you'd fill about three, four inches of soil up right here, plop your seed potatoes in, cover them with a little bit more soil. That's only a soil line to about here. So you can fold the grow bag down and let it access the sun a little bit more. And every time you have about six inches of growth, you can fill it up and fill it up and fill it up until you get to the top. So I find that potatoes work really well in grow bags specifically because you can just roll it down and give that foliage a little bit more access to sun. If you do have a little more space, you can grow them directly in a raised bed. Just put them about six inches deep in the soil, minimally hill them. You don't need to do too much there. I find hilling wastes a lot of soil and just isn't as worth it as some people seem to think that it is. And again, I've tested growing potatoes about six, seven different ways and the ones that are the laziest that use the least resources actually yield either the same or more potatoes. So why would I do it a more complex way? If you have space in ground to grow, then use this Ruth Stout modified method where all I did is I hoed out about maybe six inches or so, dropped my potatoes in. I dropped them in whole. I did not slice them. It was an easier way to grow. If you do want to make more use out of your seed potatoes, then cut them in half or cut them in thirds. You just want at least two or three eyes per potato chunk. Let them scab over just a little bit so they don't rot in the soil and you can drop those chunks in. That's perfectly fine. But what I did is I just dropped about six, seven in per row here, six different varieties. Cover them up with a bunch of straw and I've just been straw mulching them as I go. I don't want those potatoes that are popping out of the soil to be hit by the sun because then they will produce a lot of solanine, which is a green potato, which you can't really eat. So I just want to hill them up to protect them from the sun, not necessarily to build up a ton of soil. And there you go. I'm going to have a fantastic, fantastic yield out of this. Another thing finally you can do with potatoes is you have early, middle, and late season potatoes just based on the days to maturity. So I'd say the earliest is probably about 85 days from potato seed to harvest. And then you got about 135 days. And so what you can do is you can actually plant them all at the exact same time and then just know which ones are your early, middle, and late. And you can have a staggered harvest of potatoes for the whole year just by doing it that way. Next up is lettuce. I know lettuce isn't the most exciting crop, but it is a fantastic spring and fall crop. And while I give you some of my tips for improving both the yield and the flavor of your lettuce, we'll throw some varieties up here that you can just give a try this spring. So with lettuce, the things that really seem to matter are thinning it out early. So you'll plant maybe a couple of seeds per hole or per cell. And then when you transplant in or if you've direct sown, you really want to make sure and thin. The second I thinned this Great Lakes lettuce right here, after a rain or two, it really just blew up in size. Whereas in another section, even this one right here, not super thinned out early enough. And so it's competing with its little cousins right next to it. And the resources just aren't there. So thinning is hyper important with lettuce. Spacing is also quite important. You can get away with roughly this. I would say this is about four per square foot, maybe six inches apart or so. Works really, really well. With lettuce, again, it's really about the soil prep and keeping those moisture levels consistent. That's all you have to do. It's one of the few plants that can tolerate a little bit of shade, especially in the spring and the fall. Certainly in the summer, it's actually quite difficult for me to grow lettuce in the summer due to the heat causing it to bolt much like it would in the spinach that we just talked about. So with lettuce, just keep your moisture levels adequate. Give it about an inch of water a week. Mulching is going to help fantastically with lettuce. Because remember, we're eating these leaves and these leaves are truly mostly water. So lettuce, fantastic spring and fall crop. Next up on our list are cosmos, a flower. I haven't grown a lot of flowers in the past, but this one is always a staple in my garden. Tons of different varieties. You can get all sorts of different colors on these flowers and they are tolerant of a wide variety of conditions. I would say the only thing you really want to avoid with cosmos is just having them blasted by the wind. They might not do so well in that situation. But in early spring you can get them started. Then you can transplant them into the garden and they'll do well actually for quite a long time. The only thing you have to worry about with keeping them going is as soon as these flowers are spent. So if this one starts to wither a little bit, I'm going to deadhead it all the way back down to where the stem connects to the main part of the plant. Because what happens is I'm just going to be removing that part of the plant and it won't have to devote any energy towards a bloom that's already spent. So I'll just completely avoid that. And then the rest of these little buds can start to go. You can even shape your cosmos just a little bit by doing some pruning cuts and it will start to either bush out or you can scaffold it a little bit up more. And so cosmos is a fantastic one. Does it do anything in particular? No, it just looks beautiful and it brings in some pollinators in the garden for sure. I would say space them at least 18 inches apart, maybe 24 inches. What I'm doing in this particular bed right here is kind of a unique planting combo I've never really done before, which is cosmos in the corners here. And then I have almost a stadium seeding style of sunflowers. So we have these tall ones back here and then I have some dwarf ones in the front. And when all of this comes up, I'll probably put some violas down below to be a sort of floral living mulch. Next up in our guide is chamomile or chamomile if you're weird like me and like to mispronounce things. You've got German chamomile or Roman chamomile. These are your two options to choose from. I would say probably go with the German. It produces more flowers. It's an annual, but also if you let it go to seed, it will drop seed everywhere and it will just flower over and over and over again. So effectively it might act like a perennial. Roman is more the perennial variety. But German chamomile is so, so simple to grow. And actually we're right at the point here where it's going to start throwing some flowers out when you want to harvest these flowers because it's a fantastic tea flower. Actually I've used it in tea, but I've also used it to make my own version of kombucha with lemon and chamomile. And I put the actual flowers in the kombucha and it was absolutely fantastic. But it's a full sun plant. It requires a decent amount of water. It can actually survive in temperatures up to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Although I wouldn't say it will thrive in those situations. A little bit of afternoon dappled shade will work for it, but it's a fantastic one. You can see the growth habit is a little bit sort of floppy and this is well watered right now. It's just a little bit floppy. So I wouldn't say it's fantastic to just plant on its own, like in a garden bed, but it would be a really good understory plant because it's not going to get too much taller than this, right? About maybe 10 to 12 inches or so. So if you've got maybe tomatoes growing up or peas growing up, you can plant chamomile as sort of the flowering, beautiful ground cover. Now when you harvest the flowers, you want to wait until they fully open and then just snip them off and use them fresh. Or you can dry them or you can freeze them. So there's a lot of different things to do with chamomile. I think it's an underrated crop for a beginner. Now there are a lot of different crops that you can start in spring that are super easy. But another thing you need to be thinking about, if you want to make this gardening season one of your best yet, is to always be sowing and always be preparing for the season to come. So as you can see, there's quite a bit here on this new seeding table that we built and I've got things like tomatoes. Some of these are purchased and some of these are started. Some of the smaller ones are started up here. I've got backups of some of the spring crops that we just talked about, backup lettuce so I can succession sow. I've got backup peas. We even have things like strawberries here. But you really even want to start thinking about summer. So we've got peppers here and also some melons and some squash that I just really want to make sure that I'm getting in the ground in a healthy state. Now this really goes for all of you in colder climates as well. The colder the climate, the shorter your growing season becomes and the more important it is to have backups and things ready to get into the ground. So along with some of the spring stuff that we just talked about, lettuce, cabbage, peas, these sorts of things that are perfect for right now, also be thinking about backups of those crops as well as things that you should be starting for summer. And there will be guides on almost everything you see on this table coming up soon here on the Epic Gardening channel. So make sure to drop a Subscribe. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.