With grocery prices increasing rapidly, especially for produce, the media has reporting that home vegetable gardening is dramatically on the rise. Not since the Victory Gardens of World War II have so many people been inspired to plant home gardens.

It’s hard to argue with that logic, especially when most packets of seeds cost less than a dollar and can yield bountiful returns.

If you’ve never grown a garden before, this is a great time to start! May is traditionally the month for planting, but with the cool start to this growing season, there’s still time to get your garden under way.

Create a new garden by tilling a patch of land in your yard. While the soil can be worked and turned with hand tools, it’s much easier to rent or borrow a tiller to help turn the dirt and create a good planting surface. If you rake some garden fertilizer in while working the ground, it will help give your plants an even better start.

Or create a raised bed with landscape timbers and fill with bagged topsoil. A 4 foot by 4 foot garden is the perfect size if you’ve never gardened before, as you will easily be able to reach in to pick vegetables without having to step up into the garden.

Look for seed varieties that will ripen in about 60 to 75 days so that your vegetables will ripen mid-August.

Start tomatoes from plants and onions from sets, versus seeds. It’s too late to start these vegetables from seed, but a tomato plant will produce many happy returns if it’s planted now.

Children love to garden! If you have children, help encourage their enthusiasm for gardening by picking high-producing crops, such as zucchini or green beans. They will enjoy watching the vegetables grow. If you have a fence or lattice, consider planting a pole bean variety instead of a bush bean — they are easier to pick as they grow upward, and you don’t have to bend over and look for the beans.

If you don’t want to devote a portion of your yard to your garden, consider container gardening. Tomatoes thrive as container plants and will provide numerous fresh, ripe tomatoes throughout the growing season. My mom even grows pole beans in a pot on her patio with a wire trellis for them to climb up.

One of the other benefits to gardening at home is that you know exactly what kind of pesticides and chemicals (if any) are used on your crops. If your family prefers organic food, you can grow organic seed varieties with solely natural methods of pest and weed control. One natural product that can assist with keeping bugs and critters off your plants is hot pepper wax. Hot pepper wax is a spray made from capsaicin, the “heat” in hot peppers — it’s chemical free and safe for food use. There are numerous brands and varieties of hot pepper wax available, and it’s easy to spray it on your plants for effective pest and animal control.

We planted our garden last weekend, and my 3-year-old son was an avid participant, placing every vegetable seed in the dirt by himself. If the love and care with which little hands plant seeds even remotely affects how they grow, we should have a bumper crop this year!