Super fruits and vegetables are some of the best additions you can make to your diet, especially if they are fresh and organic. When these super veggies are grown right in your garden, you benefit even more because you are reaping the benefits of your own hard work and know exactly what went into producing the beautiful vegetables (and hopefully using your own compost to really give them a boost!). Some of the most nutritious veggies, or super veggies, happen to be very easy to grow in the garden (and for those that you can't grow in your garden, be sure to be buying your organic fruits and veggies using the Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen list!)
These are some of the easy to grow super veggies that you can add to your garden this year. Luckily, all of them are easy to find as seed or as seedlings that can then be transplanted into your garden beds.
Tomatoes
Tomato plants are one of the most common plants to be included in the vegetable garden, but they also happen to be a vegetable that is a superfood because they pack in a lot of vitamins and antioxidants. Any variety of tomato is a great start, but a good rule of thumb is to grow yellow varieties for flavonoids and phenolic acid and red varieties for lycopene. Make sure to check out how you can grow awesome tomatoes and how to plan your tomato garden!
Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potato plants have been getting a lot of attention lately because of their newly named status as a super veggie. The vegetable is usually doused with sugar and mashed, but there are a lot of ways to eat it that does not include the addition of sugar. Enjoying this vegetable means taking in high levels of really good for you vitamins and plenty of iron. Adding the vines to your garden is easy when you have a unused vertical garden space where the vines can spread out quickly.
Garlic
Garlic takes time and planning to grow in the garden, but if you know you want to harvest some the following year, its easy to add the bulbs in the garden at the end of fall (oh - and don't bother going out and buying a garlic plant - you can just grow garlic from kitchen scraps!). Garlic is able to provide us with high levels of manganese and other vitamins that you do not get from most vegetables. Add as many bulbs to the garden as you have room for - they do not grow very large or take up a lot of garden space so you might as well plan on harvesting enough to get you through a large portion of the year.
Spinach
Spinach is by far the best green to include in a garden because of its super veggie status. Spinach is so easy to grow, so there is really no excuse for not adding it to your vegetable garden! The seeds can be sown into the garden more than once, always there when you need some for a salad or to toss into cold dishes and sandwiches. Towards the end of summer, begin planting again for a second chance at a harvest. The seeds grow fast, but you have to harvest the spinach leaves at just the right time or they go bad quickly.
Peppers
All peppers have a great taste and provide you with nutrition, but it is the red peppers that really pack in the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that gets plants named on the super veggie list. Grow whatever red variety of pepper you enjoy the best and keep it growing and producing fruit throughout the summer. Because peppers take so long to mature, start yours off as seedlings which are always well established.
You might want to check out these other gardening tips: