I love kitchen gardens. They fascinate me. Some of my favorite plants to grow based on their usefulness, ease to take care of and period they take to mature are spinach, kales, lettuce, green brans, radishes, cucumbers, stallions, zucchinis, dhania, tomatoes and carrots.
What are your favorite plants for kitchen gardens?

More ideas?

Hi Sophie,
Have you successfully grown any of these? What is your location and set up?

Most fun is watermelon. I grew them vertically last year in a Xlarge womens stockings

Yes, Sophie, I have a kitchen garden about 100 feet from my kitchen. I also have experimented with vertical gardening with success, and really prefer it where applicable.
The garden is 100 x 80 feet in size. I grow pepper, tomato, onion, herbs, cucumber, squash, snap pea, bean, spinach, eggplant, scallion, garlic, grains, lettuce, potato, and a lot of flowers.



At harvest I preserve, boil bath can, dry and freeze the bounty. Potatoes keep nicely in our basement and usually last until March.

Sophia, and Jasmine- we have no clue where you are located, not sure what would grow where you are. My kitchen garden is raised beds, but being in zone 9a these years, it has turned into a very decent herb bed most of the winter, chuckl. I grow Cilantro 'Confetti', chives, green onions, lemon thyme, french thyme, Tuscan Blue, Goriza, and prostate rosemary, parsley, celery leaf (parsley?), Bay laurel tree, fern leaf dill ( the Bouquet dill has frozen back this year), Hilltop oregano, Kentucky Colonel spearmint, mojito mint, and peppermint, then I have tucked in around the herbs are; arugula, rainbow chard, Purple Wave mustard, Dwarf blue curled and green curled kale, and a plant or two of leaf romaine lettuce and broccoli. In the summer months I also grow a rootbeer plant, with cucumber, tomato and several hot peppers (jalapeno, cayenne, tabasco for sure and looking for a good paprika pepper), then the basils. I grow a non seeding African Blue basil for the bees and have managed to keep cuttings alive so far this winter in the house, cannot grow the sweet Genovese basils-too much humidity here and downy mildew gets them 100%. It is good we don't use as many of the basils since I have such fits growing them.

@SophieAdams ... the asian leafy vegetables are great for quick cropping, like tatsoi, mibuna, bok choy, mizuna, choy sum, garland chrysanthemum etc etc.Classic asian cabbage like Michihili is high yield in a short time - I think it's called napa cabbage in the Americas.
Also Daikon radish - these all give a big yield and high nutrition in a short time compared to resources used.

I'd recommend at least three asparagus plants - cropping for 20 years is a great return for less work. mulch and feed, you're good to go, and you get the ferns later to provide shade for some other crops in summer, or a pretty backdrop - depends where you are. They also give you some free mulch when they die back!
Honestly, so much depends on your length of growing season, average temperature, frost situation etc.

The others have pretty much said everything, but if you can trellis and grow climbers like beans, peas, tomatoes, squash and marrows, you'll get a great return for space used.