![]() It is easy to get excited and want to grow a little of everything, trust me! A good strategy for choosing vegetables and other food plants, is to go through your fridge and pantry and find out what it is that your family eats most or finds most enjoyable. Once you have a place for your plants to live, you can begin to plan what to grow. Even with pre-mixed soil you will still want to read up on what you’re planting, as some crops will need more fertility than others, and if you want to continue to use the same soil for many years there are considerations for that as well. If you would rather avoid the work of building your native soil you can instead create raised beds or garden in pots or planters, using a pre-mixed soil for the purpose of gardening, such as G&B Organic Raised Bed soil. If you want to try to make your native soil better, first get a soil test to tell you what you need to add to make it more hospitable. Either type will need a lot of amendments to grow vegetables, which generally require a rich, loamy, well-draining soil. Here on Whidbey and much of the PNW we have either very sandy/rocky soil or hard clay soil. The very first thing you will need to do to plant an annual vegetable garden is make sure that you’ve got good soil ready to plant into. You can find your Hardiness Zone HERE, this will come in handy for understanding which plants will do best for you and when to plant them based on the temperature range. Here on Whidbey Island, we are in Zone 8b. ![]() Western Washington falls into USDA Hardiness Zones 6-9, so planting recommendations will vary a bit depending on where you are exactly. We struggle more with veggies that like heat or long growing seasons like tomatoes, corn, melons, and peppers, though they are not impossible, they just require more care and consideration. ![]() Peas, lettuces, collards, kale, cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and the like are made for our weather. We can grow cool season veggies like nobody’s business. Here in the temperate Pacific Northwest, we have conditions favorable for a lot of great edible plants, but more challenging for others.
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