Varities

There are many different varieties to choose from and you may want to try something new each year. Start by making a list of vegetables you would like to grow.

Zones

Using your seed packets and online advice, plan where you want to plant each variety. Remember to consider the needs of the vegetable in terms of sun and water.

Jessica Dommes’ backyard looked like a life-size advertisement for the joy of gardening on a recent April morning. A yellow forsythia bush bloomed under a cloudless blue sky; the sun shone in that newly spring way that makes you want to go outside and stay there.

Dommes, 33, was preparing for the season — but not by cobbling together a raised bed or buying cucumber seeds at the hardware store. Instead, Dommes had scheduled a consultation with Backyard Eats, a young Philly company that helps people build, plant, maintain, and even harvest home vegetable gardens.

“At my last place, I painstakingly dug up the grass and put in beds myself,” said Dommes, a computer programmer and novice pandemic gardener. “And I do not want to repeat that experience at all.”

Your grandfather’s kitchen garden this is not. The wooden raised beds are absolutely level. Thin black irrigation tubes run through dirt rows like at a tiny industrial farm. QR codes for each seedling detail when and how to harvest. For an added fee, customers can sign up for experts to pluck the finished product, which more than half opt to do.

It is perhaps especially appealing to perfectionists, foodies, people who are nostalgic about the gardens their grandparents grew, and those with money but no time.

The cost can be steep: An average garden project, including two 4-by-8-foot beds, starts at $5,000 for a one-time installation fee, plus roughly $1,000-$2,000 for planting and full-service maintenance from March through November. (Customers can also add or subtract services a la carte).

Most community gardens focus on public spaces and most landscaping companies don’t specialize in “edibles,” as vegetables are called in the gardening world. That’s where Backyard Eats comes in.

“People have that feeling of growing their own food. We’re providing the feeling without all the potential frustrations,” said Mike Bennett, the company’s operations manager, who visited Dommes’ yard for the consultation. “To the extent they have time to devote to it, they can just go out there with their child to a perfectly clean garden where everything’s successful and just have fun.”