Fast Growing Vegetables – Learn About Vegetable Plants With Quick Growth

Radish Plants Popping Out Of The Soil
radish
(Image credit: Gardening Know How, via Nikki Tilley)

Sometimes you garden for a challenge, and sometimes you garden to get exactly the vegetables you want. Sometimes though, you just want the most bang for your buck, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Luckily, some vegetables grow very fast and put out a big reward in flavor. Keep reading to learn more about vegetable plants with quick growth.

Fast Growing Vegetables for the Garden

Whether you have a short growing season, planting late in the season, or you just plain want results soon, fast growing vegetables are plentiful and deeply satisfying to grow. Here are some of the best vegetable plants with quick growth times: Radish– Ready in 20 to 30 days. Radishes are the king of fast-growing vegetables. Their seeds sprout after just a few days and the plants grow very quickly. Leaf lettuce– Ready in about 30 days. Not to be confused with head lettuce, leaf lettuce puts out individual leaves that can be harvested one at a time. After very little time, the leaves are big and plentiful enough to begin picking. The plant will continue to put out new leaves, too, which means this fast-growing plant keeps on giving. Spinach– Ready in about 30 days. Very similar to leaf lettuce, spinach plants continue to put out new leaves and the first ones can be harvested just a month after planting the seeds. These very early leaves are called baby spinach. Arugula– Ready in 20 days. The little leaves of arugula have a sharp, bitter taste that goes great in salads. Bush beans– Ready in 50 days. Unlike the leafy plants in this list, bush beans have to grow an entire plant and then put out pods. That doesn’t slow them down very much though. Bush beans are small, self-supporting plants, not to be confused with their slower growing pole bean cousins. Peas– Ready in 60 days. Peas are very fast-growing vining plants that are extremely satisfying to watch as they cover a trellis in a short span of time.

Liz Baessler
Senior Editor

The only child of a horticulturist and an English teacher, Liz Baessler was destined to become a gardening editor. She has been with Gardening Know how since 2015, and a Senior Editor since 2020. She holds a BA in English from Brandeis University and an MA in English from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. After years of gardening in containers and community garden plots, she finally has a backyard of her own, which she is systematically filling with vegetables and flowers.