30 Best Inspiring Vegetable Gardening Quotes

You’ll dig these inspiring vegetable gardening quotes, with wisdom about growing your own food in your home garden.

Thought provoking garden quotes from people like Michael Pollan, Alice B. Toklas and Anthony Bourdain will inspire you to dig into the soil, plant seeds and get growing.

These inspirational garden quotes remind us of the simple pleasures of growing your own veggies, and the deep satisfaction of enjoying the fruits of your labors. (Is there anything better than eating a ripe summer tomato you grew yourself?)

Vegetable Garden Quotes

“What was paradise, but a garden full of vegetables and herbs and pleasure? Nothing there but delights.” – William Lawson

“A garden returns 50x the investment you put into it. Not just food, but joy, peace and a real connection with creation. A spiritual retreat from a noisy world and hurried people. Grow a garden.” – Unknown

“The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby—how could anything so beautiful be mine? And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.” – Alice B. Toklas

“It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.” – Lewis Grizzard

“I envision a day when every city and town has front and back yards, community gardens and growing spaces, nurtured into life by neighbors who are no longer strangers, but friends who delight in the edible rewards offered from a garden they discovered together.” – Greg Peterson

“For all things produced in a garden, whether of salads or fruits, a poor man will eat better that has one of his own, than a rich man that has none.” – J. C. Loudoun

“I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

 “A vegetable garden doesn’t just feed your body. It also feeds your soul” – Doug Green

“I believe that the energy of humans who touched those beans goes into the beans as well. They become vibrant because of the handling. This vibrancy is something that a machine or harvester doesn’t have. From my standpoint … I believe that if food is grown and prepared with love… infused with love… well, it can be the humblest of food, but because it’s prepared with love, it’s special.” – Valerie Phipps

“To create a garden is to search for a better world. In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise. Whether the result is a horticultural masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future. This hope for the future is at the heart of all gardening.” – Marina Schinz

“The smell of manure, of the sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds — rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.” – Doris Lessing

“People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating.” – Anthony Bourdain

“Like tending to life’s canvas, growing artichokes is an art in itself – from thorny beginnings to the masterpiece of tender hearts, each leaf unfurls a story of patience, nurturing, and the beauty of nature’s brushstroke.” – Unknown

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.” – Michael Pollan

“One of the most delightful things about the garden is the anticipation it provides.” – W.E. Johns

“There’s a reason why tomatoes represent the best of summer:  fat and sensual, like biting into a tiny beam of juicy red sunlight cooled in a stream.” – Edmond Manning

“Green tastes like life, feels like energy, looks like peacefulness, smells like earth’s love, sounds like vibrant health (your body listens well). Eat your greens, go wild for greens, play in green, weave green into your colorful daily existence!” – Terri Guillemets

“Gardening is something you learn by doing – and by making mistakes….  Like cooking, gardening is a constant process of experimentation, repeating the successes and throwing out the failures.”- Carol Stocker

“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” — Gertrude Jekyll 

“Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant’s hood of heart-shaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods hanging underneath could make me catch my breath.” – Michael Pollan

“You know you’re a gardener when you’re happy to devote three months of your life growing tomatoes to save $1.27.”— Author Unknown. (Note: Be sure to check out our 12 frugal gardening tips!)

“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.” – Francis Bacon

“There are no happier folks than plant lovers, and none more generous than those who garden.” – Ernest Wilson

“A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”— Wendell Berry

“A garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature.” – Jeff Cox

“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies, but never grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives”  – Gertrude Jekyll

“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.” – Alfred Austin

“However big or small your garden is, if you allow nature to touch your spirit, gardening will bring returns of peace, satisfaction, and well-being for as long as you continue to wander the garden path.” – Norman Hansen

“I have found, through years of practice, that people garden in order to make something grow; to interact with nature; to share, to find sanctuary, to heal, to honor the earth, to leave a mark.” – Julie Moir Messervy

“Seek to understand what draws you to the garden.  You may discover greater rewards than the blue ribbons awarded for the biggest pumpkin or the best preserves.  You may find the garden becomes a teacher and crop ‘failures’ become lessons learned.”- Norman Hansen

“It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season.” — Kate Morton

Imagine small strips of land between apartment buildings that have been turned into vegetable gardens, and urban orchards planted at schools and churches to grow food for our communities. The seeds of the urban farming movement already are growing within our reality.” – Greg Peterson

“A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.” — Liberty Hyde Bailey

If you have any favorite quotes or thoughts about vegetable gardening to add to this list, drop a comment below!