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| Home > Types of Gardening > Shade Gardening > Fruits and Vegetables
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| | Fruits and vegetables in Shade Gardening
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 Almost all food crops grow best in sunny locations. Not only do they need full sunlight for good growth, few tolerate root competition from trees.
Cool-season salad vegetables such as lettuce, spinach and radishes may benefit from light shading through the heat of the summer. Beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, peas, potatoes, rhubarb and turnips will grow in light shade but not produce as large a crop as plants growing in full sun.
Currants and gooseberries are fruits which tolerate medium shade and still produce a crop. Bramble fruits such as blackberries and raspberries grow in light shade, but yields will be reduced.
The mindset that shade is a problem probably stems from the first experience of a treed backyard with brick-hard soil and a remnant of lawn struggling in the shadows.
If grass won`t even grow there, how can anything else? But there are many attractive perennials that grow well in shade.
Getting them to thrive is a matter of enriching the shade garden soil. Do keep in mind that a flower garden directly under deciduous trees will be mostly spring blooming.
Generally, most plants that do well in shade, including spring bulbs that naturalize, bloom early in the season before the leaves come out on the trees.
This doesn`t mean there won`t other flowers in bloom during the rest of the season, but you`ll have a more limited palette of flowering plants to choose from. Impatiens is one of flowers that will give you color in the shade all season long - one of the big reasons it`s such a popular annual.
When it comes to shade perennials, attractive leaf textures and colors are important because foliage will be your shade garden mainstay through the season.
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