Across much of North America, May is a great time to start an outdoor vegetable garden. Soil temperatures have warmed up enough to allow seeds to germinate outside, and the danger of frost has passed.

One of the joys (and frustrations) of gardening is that there’s always something new to learn. Every year, you’ll face a new challenge, whether it’s a new weather pattern or a new set of pest pressures to keep you on your toes. This year, I invite you to join me on a gardening adventure on the journey to sustainability.

If you’ve never grown anything edible before, one of the easiest is sprouts. These are a fun and nutritious thing to add to a salad, sandwich, or stir fry. When I had my sustainability store, we sold seeds and sprouting kits, making it super simple to get started. If you don’t want to buy a kit, you can use a plate and a couple of pieces of damp paper towel to try your first few batches of sprouts.

You can use alfalfa, broccoli, mung bean, beet, radish, clover, kale, sunflower and many more types of seeds for sprouting. The instructions are simple for most seeds: just soak them, keep them warm and moist in a place where they can get some air (in between two damp paper towels usually works well), and then in a few days, a tiny plant will start to grow.

Sprouts don’t need any soil or light: the young plants use the instructions in their genes and the energy in their endosperms to combine molecules from water and air to start growing.

I encourage new gardeners (especially young ones) to start with sprouting for several reasons. First, you can sprout all kinds of seeds inside at any time of year. You’ll start to recognize the different shapes, sizes, and colors of seeds, and you’ll learn to recognize seedlings. This is
super helpful later in your gardening career when you need to be able to spot the difference between weeds and the plants you want in your garden.

Second, you’ll learn about germination: how to test batches of seeds to know whether they are still viable (i.e., able to grow) or whether you need to buy new seeds. Third, it’s the closest thing to instant gratification you’ll ever get in gardening! Many seeds take just a few days to sprout, so you don’t have to wait long to enjoy your harvest.

Of course, as with any gardening attempt, you’ll probably run into problems. The seeds might dry out and won’t germinate. You might get mold or mildew. But troubleshooting and solving these problems won’t be too expensive, and the lessons you learn will be valuable for a lifetime.

If you’ve already mastered sprouting, how about trying a few plants in flower pots? This approach is called “container gardening.” One advantage to containers is that you can control the soil in the container, allowing you to grow plants even if you live in an apartment or an urban lot without a yard. Another advantage is that the container walls make it a little harder for certain kinds of pests to eat your plants.

Herbs like chives and “micro-greens” like lettuce (harvested when the leaves are still very small) are good choices for container growing from seed. Fruits like strawberries and tomatoes (which are technically fruits even though we think of them as vegetables) are easy to buy as seedlings (small plants that are already growing) and then transplant into larger pots this time of year.

If you’re thinking about growing your own food to reduce your use of plastic, you might be dismayed to find that most gardening centers sell potting and gardening soil in plastic bags. It’s hard to get a container garden going without buying some plastic. Still, after your first season or two, you can make the transition to sustainability by making your own soil and your own natural fertilizer from compost. And if you have a patch of land and want to dive into the deep end of the gardening pool, you can always just put seeds or seedlings in the ground and try your luck growing food without any plastic, pesticides, or synthetic fertilizers, the way humans have been doing it for thousands of years.

Fred Horch is principal adviser of Sustainable Practice. To receive expert action guides to help your household and organizations become superbly sustainable, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.

Copy the Story Link