The Best Crops for Small Gardens

A small plot, a patio or a few pots can still feed you well — the trick is choosing crops that earn their space. This guide ranks the best vegetables, fruit and herbs for a small UK garden by what actually matters when room is tight: value and yield per square metre.

What "best" means in a small garden

When space is the limiting factor, "best" isn't the biggest plant or the heaviest single crop. It's the crop that returns the most food, flavour or money for the ground it occupies.

Two questions sort the winners from the space-wasters:

• Value per square metre. A pack of supermarket salad leaves or fresh herbs costs a small fortune and wilts in days. Grow your own and the saving is real. A sack of maincrop potatoes costs pennies — so they're a poor use of precious space.
• Yield over a long season. Crops you pick repeatedly (cut-and-come-again salad, climbing beans, courgettes) keep giving for months. One-and-done crops give a single harvest, then sit there.

The best small-garden crops score well on both, and many grow upwards — so they take a footprint the size of a dinner plate.

The top picks

Here's where to spend your limited space, roughly in order of value.

Salad leaves. The single best use of a small bed, trough or windowsill box. Sow cut-and-come-again lettuce and mixed leaves, pick the outer leaves, and the plant keeps regrowing for weeks. A square metre can keep you in salad all summer. Sow little and often from March, and shade it in high summer to slow bolting.

Climbing beans. Runner and French climbing beans grow up a wigwam of canes, so they crop heavily from almost no ground. A single wigwam in a large pot or border corner can give you beans from July to October. Pick regularly to keep them coming.

Tomatoes. Hard to beat for flavour and value — a shop-bought punnet of decent tomatoes is dear, and home-grown taste better. One cordon tomato plant up a cane, in a pot or grow bag in a sunny, sheltered spot, can yield several kilos. Keep them fed and watered and they'll repay the fuss.

Chillies and peppers. Compact, productive and genuinely expensive to buy fresh. A couple of chilli or pepper plants on a warm windowsill, in a porch or by a sunny wall give months of picking from a tiny footprint — and a single glut freezes beautifully.

Soft fruit. Strawberries thrive in pots, troughs and hanging baskets, lifting the fruit off the ground and away from slugs. They're costly to buy and crop for weeks. A few plants in a basket by the back door is one of the best returns in the whole garden.

Herbs. Pound for pound, the best value of all. A supermarket pot of basil costs more than a packet of seed, and cut herbs barely last the week. A windowsill or doorstep of Mediterranean herbs — basil, mint, rosemary, parsley — pays for itself in a fortnight and stays fresh because you pick it as you cook.

Growing upwards and in containers

In a small garden, the air above your beds is free real estate. Train climbing beans, cordon tomatoes, cucumbers and peas up canes, netting or a sunny fence and you multiply your growing area without taking another inch of ground.

Containers turn any hard surface into a plot. A balcony, patio, doorstep or windowsill can grow a surprising amount — see our pick of the best vegetables for containers for the crops that do best in pots. The main rules: use the biggest pots you can, a decent multipurpose compost, and water more often than you think, as containers dry out fast in summer.

A few square metres of beds, a handful of large pots and a vertical support or two will out-produce a bigger plot full of the wrong crops.

What to skip

Some crops are simply the wrong tool for a small garden — not because they're hard, but because they're greedy for space and cheap to buy. Skip these until you have room to spare:

• Maincrop potatoes — they sprawl, and a sack costs pennies. (Earlies in a pot for that new-potato taste are a fairer trade.)
• Pumpkins and winter squash — one plant can swallow several square metres.
• Brussels sprouts and other big brassicas — slow, large and hungry; cheap in the shops.
• Sweetcorn — needs a block of plants to pollinate well, so it's awkward in tight space.
• Maincrop onions — fine and easy, but cheap to buy; grow a few spring onions or salad leaves there instead.

None of these are bad crops — they just don't earn their keep when every square metre counts.

For the seeds, compost and few tools that get all of this going, see our starter buying guide, and browse the full getting started section for the basics of soil, sowing and watering.