How to Start a Garden Without Overthinking It

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You ever think about how to start a garden and then fall face-first into a black hole of internet advice that makes it sound like you need a soil degree, a lunar calendar, and at least a thousand dollars worth of gear from Tractor Supply?

Same.

So let me tell you how to actually start a garden—the stupid simple way.

This post is part of my Stupid Simple Gardening series—real talk and no-pressure help for folks who want to grow food without all the complicated nonsense.

Click here to see the full series + listen to the podcast.

We’re not getting into the complicated raised bed setup you saw on Pinterest. No pH testing, no double digging, and definitely no 72 seed varieties under grow lights.

This is more like: dig a hole. Put a seed in it. Water it.

That’s it. That’s the post. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Small shovel and two packets of seeds in the dirt to start a garden

What do I need in order to start a garden?

Okay, okay. Some of you want a little more information. So what do you actually need, bare bones, in order to get a garden going?

Dirt. Any dirt. It doesn’t have to be fancy.
Seeds. Maybe start with one kind of thing, not 60.
Water. Rain counts. A hose works. Even a coffee mug full of water if that’s what you’ve got.
Sun. If your spot gets a decent chunk of sunlight each day, you’re golden.

That’s honestly all you need to start. Everything else is extra.

You don’t have to do it all perfectly. Doing it “right” isn’t required either. What matters is that you actually do it. That’s how you start a garden.

Where can I plant my garden?

I wish I still had pictures our our first gardens, where we proudly grew vegetables wherever we could fit them on the edge of the postage stamp sized yard of our main street house. Had blogging been around back in those days, I’m sure someone would have informed me that we could not, in fact, grow the things we were growing in the set up we had.

And yet, we did.

You can, too. You can plant stuff in:

A corner of your yard
A 5-gallon bucket
A cracked tote you found in the garage
That old wagon you were gonna throw out
Literally anywhere that has dirt and sun

large cucumber and squash plants growing in 5 gallon buckets

These days, my garden is pretty big. That’s what two decades of gardening and moving to a 5 acre homestead will do. But the point is… see that big ol’ bushy cucumber vine there? That’s three cucumber seedlings in a five gallon bucket.

I’ve dug holes in the middle of our yard and dropped strawberry plants in. One year, I plopped a tomato plant in an old 4-gallon pot we reused from getting apple trees. Squash? That went in an old cracked feed tub. And I’ve been known to stick some kind of leafy green thing in a random “oh, hey… where did this big container come from?”—and it’s done just fine. They’ve all produced food and—stop me if I’m wrong, but—that is the point of why we start a garden, right?

(Looking for other ideas of what you could plant in? The 104 Homestead features some super creative reused container ideas for planting, even an old guitar and a shoe organizer!)

Compost. Bugs. Soil tests. How much do you actually need to care?

Save those questions for later. You don’t need to know it all to begin. Seriously.

You learn best by doing, and you’ll figure it out as you go.

And guess what? That’s how most of us started. Not with a plan, but with a shovel and some hope. In the grand scheme of things, having access to a million bits of information and advice about how to grow anything and everything is a relatively new concept. And in some ways, I think too much how-to is complicating the entire thing.

Because when we sell the idea there is a certain way to do something, we make people believe they have to get it exactly right before they even begin. And that’s a great way to make sure folks never start a garden at all.

The truth is, you’re going to learn more from sticking your hands in the dirt than you ever will from watching another YouTube video. Mistakes are part of the process. Imperfect gardens still grow food. And sometimes the best way to figure it out… is just to try.

Because you know what? It just might work. 🙂