The Best Vegetable Plants To Grow In the Shade

What Are The Best Vegetable Plants To Grow In the Shade? Are There Any that Prefer Shade? This Article Answers Your Shade & Vegetable Questions.

Social media and allotments are full of questions about the best vegetable plants to grow in the shade. The answer depends on what we mean by shade. Most vegetables grown in the UK prefer plenty of sunlight. Very few prefer shade. There’s a simple reason for this. For plants to grow they have to photosynthesis and photosynthesis is powered by sunlight. The less sunlight there is the less photosynthesis there is and the slower the plant grows. That also means potentially smaller the plant grows and few gardeners want small plants to harvest. They want plants that are big enough to eat!

How Much Shade is Too Much Shade For Vegetables?

It’s hard to be categoric about this except to say that in most cases the more sun the better. But a rule of thumb might be to say that most vegetable plants need at least six hours good sunshine a day if they are to grow well. Of course in winter we get much less daylight and achieving this figure is hard. It’s one of the reasons why plants grow slower in winter. Another is the cold, and less sunshine also means it is colder, both air and soil temperature.

I’m often told by gardeners that crops such as lettuce prefer the shade. I disagree. As a commercial grower I grew around half a million lettuce a year and I know from experience that they more sunlight they had the better. They grew faster. They were less likely to bolt. They grew bigger. They were healthier and suffered fewer pests and diseases.

I had one greenhouse that was partly shaded by a hedge. It was a big greenhouse and held 12,000 lettuce at a time. Crops in the front of this greenhouse matured a week before the ones in the shade. The few rows closest the hedge, where the shade was worse, often got binned as they didn’t mature into saleable crops. Sadly I didn’t own the hedge so couldn’t cut it back to allow more light. When the greenhouse was built the hedge wasn’t there .. no commercial grower would knowingly build a greenhouse in the shade of a hedge.

Of course many readers of this article aren’t commercial growers and don’t depend on the crops for a living. But I use the commercial example to demonstrate how bad shade affects crops. 12,000 lettuce should, in theory, have produced 1000 boxes of lettuce. Most greenhouses of this size would produce around 998-9 boxes. This one regularly produced 820 boxes! The rest just weren’t good enough to sell.

Growing Vegetables In A Shady Garden

If your garden is shady don’t despair. There are crops you can grow. They just won’t yield quite as well. And if it is very shady they will also get drawn (etiolated).

But being drawn isn’t critical if you are growing veg such as peas for pea shoots. They tend to be a bit straggly but will still taste good. In fact any leafy crop will produce something edible. So go for things like lettuce where you can stripe leaves off the stem rather than harvest the while plant. Think about herbs such as coriander, parsley, sage, thyme etc. They prefer bright sunlight but will tolerate a bit of shade and and we tend not to harvest vast amounts from sage and thyme.

The other thought is to grow plants in containers that can be moved. Some areas are shady at certain times of the year and sunnier at others. So move the containers to the best place at a given time of year. My heavy containers are relatively easy to move with a sack truck.

Are There Any Shade Loving Vegetables?

Yes, just a few few. Crops such as wasabi actually prefer shade. It’s an exception.

Out of interest I’ve just Googled “Vegetables that grow in full shade uk”. I was offered lots of pages about veg that would tolerate some shade …. but NOT ONE that actually suggested veg that PREFER shade.

The reason is simple. There aren’t any popular veg that prefer shade.

More on Best Vegetable Plants To Grow In the Shade Below 

Do Food Forest Plants Prefer Shade?

Yes. By definition food forest plants prefer or tolerate some degree of shade. But most grow best in forest glades rather than deep forest or woodland. And none of them are the vegetable plants we find being grown in abundance in gardens and allotments.