Home » Latest » Interviews And Interesting News » 8 Fast Growing Vegetables You Can Grow at Home in a Hurry

8 Fast Growing Vegetables You Can Grow at Home in a Hurry

5

InfoSearched 115 0 Interviews And Interesting News

9.5

SaveSavedRemoved 1

A former soldier turned homesteader is showing anxious pandemic gardeners how to get food out of the ground in weeks, not months.

As COVID-19 lockdowns spread across the globe in March 2020, Mark Valencia — the Australian creator behind the YouTube channel Self Sufficient Me — published a video aimed squarely at newly nervous home gardeners: “8 Fast Growing Vegetables You Can Grow at Home in a Hurry.” Filming from his 3-acre subtropical property roughly 45 kilometers north of Brisbane in Southeast Queensland, Valencia walked through a lineup of crops chosen for one reason above all else: speed to harvest.

The pitch was practical, not political. With stay-at-home orders rolling out and supermarket shelves getting picked clean, Valencia’s video answered a question a lot of first-time gardeners were suddenly asking — what can I actually grow that will feed me soon, not eventually.

• Radishes top the list, maturing in roughly three to four weeks from seed.
• Green bush beans, spinach, lettuce, Asian greens such as bok choy, arugula (rocket), and spring onions round out the fast-turnaround lineup.
• Valencia demonstrates cut-and-come-again harvesting on leafy greens, letting a single planting keep producing over multiple pickings.

Speed Emerges as Primary Priority

Valencia’s homestead videos usually lean into longer-term self-sufficiency projects, but this one was built for urgency. He frames the video around crops that can move from seed to plate in a matter of weeks rather than months, a deliberate response to the food security anxiety spreading alongside the pandemic itself. For anyone staring at a bare backyard or a couple of pots on a balcony, that distinction — weeks versus months — was the whole point.

Radishes can be ready to pull in as little as three weeks — making them, by Valencia’s own reckoning, the fastest vegetable on the list.

The Eight Crops, Broken Down

Radishes lead because nothing else on the list beats their clock — three to four weeks from seed to harvest, minimal fuss required. Green bush beans take longer to establish but reward patience with a steady, repeat-picking yield once they get going. Spinach and lettuce are the leafy backbone of the list, both suited to raised beds or containers and both responsive to the cut-and-come-again technique Valencia demonstrates on camera, where outer leaves are harvested first so the plant keeps producing.

Asian greens — bok choy and pak choi specifically — get singled out for how forgiving they are in small spaces, while arugula, known to Australian and British gardeners as rocket, offers a peppery, fast-cycling green that Valencia treats as a near-instant salad crop. Spring onions round out the eight, prized less for raw speed and more for how easily they slot into a container or the gaps between other plantings.

Soil, Sun, and Water Before Anything Else

Valencia is consistent throughout the video that fast crops still fail without basic prep. He walks through soil preparation, positioning for adequate sunlight, and the importance of consistent watering — the three variables he treats as non-negotiable regardless of which of the eight crops a beginner picks. It’s a pragmatic checklist rather than a lecture, aimed at someone who may be planting a vegetable for the first time in their life.

That beginner focus runs through the whole video. Valencia isn’t building a market garden here; he’s showing raised beds, small plots, and containers as viable options for people working with a balcony or a patch of backyard, which lines up with the broader shift toward home food production that took hold as lockdowns set in. Anyone looking to go further down that path might also check out how to turn a lawn into a vegetable garden, or how container growing extends to fruit with guides on growing raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries in containers.

A Homestead Built for This Moment

Valencia’s channel, Self Sufficient Me, had already built an audience around backyard food production long before the pandemic gave the subject new urgency. His subtropical Queensland setup — chickens, fruit trees, raised beds, and now this crash course in speed-growing — reflects the kind of small-footprint self-sufficiency that suddenly looked a lot more appealing to viewers stuck at home with time on their hands and uncertainty on the news.

Radishes in three weeks, cut-and-come-again lettuce and spinach feeding a household for a month off one planting, bok choy filling a gap in a raised bed — none of it replaces a supermarket trip, but that was never the promise. The video’s whole value is in the turnaround time, and for viewers hitting play in March 2020 wondering how fast they could actually get something edible out of the dirt, three to four weeks for that first radish pull was the answer they were looking for.