6 Must-Plant Produce for Spring Gardens

We've talked about cold crop produce, and now it's time to talk about some of the other options you can plant when the weather gets warmer!

Tomatoes, green beans, peppers, jalapenos, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes all made the lineup in the second half of our garden this Spring! We have also tried watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, pumpkins, and gourds in the past. By the middle of May, it is pretty safe to go ahead and get these all planted!

We have four different varieties of tomatoes: Roma, Jet Star, Celebrity, and Sweet Chelsea cherry. We planted in a row the length of our garden, about 2.5 feet apart.

We love Roma for their sturdy, less juicy structure. Jet Star and Celebrity are your typical slicing tomatoes, and we love those on BLT's, burgers, or just as a side! All three of these tomatoes are great in making salsa or pasta sauce! This is the first year we've tried the Sweet Chelsea variety of cherry tomatoes, but whatever variety we go with, we love having them for salads or snacks!

We always plant tons of green beans, and Jade Green Bean seed was our choice this year. Beans are one of the options you can let kids plant, as they're not as fragile as tomatoes or peppers, and you don't have to keep track of how many you've planted in a hill like cucumbers. Spacing them about 1.5 inches apart in a row has worked well for us!

We planted our trusty Big Bertha Bell and Sweet Banana peppers, as well as Jalafuego jalapenos. All of these were planted 1.5 feet apart in a corner of our garden, and we went ahead and put their small cages on at the same time. They don't take long at all to bloom and produce peppers!

We tried two varieties of cucumbers: Marketmore and a new-to-us variety, Cool Breeze.

We planted the cucumbers differently than we ever have by planting hills of 4-5 seeds each, about 2ft apart in a row the length of the garden. Once they began vining out, we added panels to each side of the row so they could climb up. (More on that in our cucumber harvest post coming soon!) Whatever we don't eat fresh, we make into pickles to eat all year long!

The sweet potatoes we purchased were unmarked, so I am unsure of the variety. They were teeny tiny, just a few leaves per root. We planted these every 2 feet apart, which is closer than we normally do. With limited space left in the garden at our new house, we figured we could experiment a little with how well they do in a bit of a tighter area and vine out into the yard.

They normally produce very large sweet potatoes that we harvest closer to Fall. We are still eating last years sweet potatoes, so they last a VERY long time if stored in cool, dark areas!

You should start seeing blooms on tomatoes, peppers, and beans in the first week of June, with blooms on cucumbers soon after!