Grow what you will actually eat, not what you wish you would eat but won’t actually eat. Learned this the hard way.
As such I now primarily grow tomatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, malibar spinach, and strawberries despite being good at producing other things that would go to waste with some regularity.
(Still working on winter / fall gardening. Gonna try turnips and Fava beans.)
I would add to that that your first year or so, it is not bad to plant something easy that will overproduce. In the long run you aren’t going to want much zucchini, but your first year it is motivating to have something come up that is edible, once the birds have eaten your berries, the insects have devastated your lettuce, and your tomatoes have mysteriously decided not to give you anything. I would have given up early on if I didn’t have something that produced a reasonable amount the first year. And you can often give away excess fresh vegetables, gaining some small amount of social capital.
(OTOH, if you need to lose weight, eating what you grow rather than buying something you might like a little better should help. At least it pushed me from 44 to 40 kg (I am 157 cm high).)
ETA: there were other reasons, too, but I think this was what did it.
Grow what you will actually eat, not what you wish you would eat but won’t actually eat. Learned this the hard way.
As such I now primarily grow tomatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, malibar spinach, and strawberries despite being good at producing other things that would go to waste with some regularity.
(Still working on winter / fall gardening. Gonna try turnips and Fava beans.)
I would add to that that your first year or so, it is not bad to plant something easy that will overproduce. In the long run you aren’t going to want much zucchini, but your first year it is motivating to have something come up that is edible, once the birds have eaten your berries, the insects have devastated your lettuce, and your tomatoes have mysteriously decided not to give you anything. I would have given up early on if I didn’t have something that produced a reasonable amount the first year. And you can often give away excess fresh vegetables, gaining some small amount of social capital.
(OTOH, if you need to lose weight, eating what you grow rather than buying something you might like a little better should help. At least it pushed me from 44 to 40 kg (I am 157 cm high).)
ETA: there were other reasons, too, but I think this was what did it.