Grow a Pizza Garden in Your Own Backyard
Updated: Jun. 29, 2023
Pizzas come in all shapes and flavors! Here's how you can grow your own by creating a pizza garden featuring tomatoes, peppers and more.
Plant a Pizza Garden Full of Fresh Ingredients
Pizzas come in all shapes, colors and flavors! But the basics are usually the same: crust, sauce, cheese and toppings. As a gardener, you can grow many of the ingredients for your sauce and toppings right outside your back (or front) door. Here’s how to grow the best pizza garden.
Story courtesy of All-America Selections. Find more creative gardening tips at ngb.org.
Check out the top 10 plants to grow for a cocktail, mocktail or tea garden.
Pizza Sauce
Roma Tomato
Great pizza sauce starts with delicious Roma tomatoes. Early Resilience is a rounded Roma with a deep red interior color, uniform maturity and good-quality flesh for cooking, which is great for a pizza sauce. This variety produces determinate, bushy plants that are resistant to blossom end rot, giving you a large yield and less fruit loss.
Psst—don’t make these common tomato garden mistakes.
Oregano
Cleopatra oregano’s foliage makes this herb one worth appreciating for both its ornamental value and flavor. Unlike most Greek and Italian oreganos, it has a mildly spicy, pepperminty flavor. Use it in Mediterranean dishes, soups and sauces. This compact, trailing plant develops a high yield of leaves that are flavorful as a dried spice when fresh isn’t an option.
Here’s how to harvest, dry, and store your herbs.
Onion
Super Star is an improved white sweet onion recommended for all spring gardens in North America. Most onions require either long days with more than 12 hours of sunlight or short days to bulb. But Super Star is widely adaptable. Resistant to pink root, these onions are exceptional when eaten raw, in salads or cooked in sauces.
Check out the top 10 vegetables that grow well in shade.
Pizza Toppings
Sweet Peppers
Dragonfly plants yield beautiful purple peppers for your pizza garden. The peppers transform from green into purple fruits that are delicious at any stage of maturity. With their above-average, robust flavor, they’ll add plenty of color and taste to your pizza.
A vivid yellow snacking pepper with four lobes like a larger bell pepper, Just Sweet is ideal for smaller pizzas. The 3-inch fruits are deliciously sweet with thick walls, and the plants have been bred to have a strong, bushy habit.
Sweetie Pie is a mini bell pepper that’s easy to grow, with an excellent fruit set even under hot and humid conditions. It’ll also adapt well to a container or small garden. Fruits are thick-walled, sweet and flavorful, and can be harvested when they’re green or red. Eat them fresh, grilled, stir-fried or baked on a pizza.
Check out the more of the best peppers to grow in your veggie garden.
Hot Peppers
For a cayenne pepper with extra-large fruit, try Wildcat. The 8-inch peppers have a smoky flavor and peppery sweetness with a mild pungency of 500 to 1,500 Scoville heat units, which means they’re in the mild range of the heat scale.
Mighty, strong and hot, Quickfire peppers deliver plenty of hot Thai-type fruits of 40,000 Scoville units. The compact, sturdy plant is ideal for your pizza garden and container gardening. Buffy has a good yield of juicy, thick-walled green to red fruits at 500,000 Scoville units on strong, upright plants.
If you love gardening and cooking, you should try baking botanical focaccia.
Colorful Tomatoes
Now you can experience the sweet, mild flavor of an orange heirloom tomato only 75 days from transplant with hybrid Chef’s Choice Orange. Its disease resistance is an added bonus. This pick has a bright, almost neon, internal color, and superior flesh taste and texture.
Pink Delicious is an early maturing tomato with a balanced sweet and acidic flavor. The fruit has an heirloom look, flavor and texture, and the plant is easy to grow because of its hybrid disease resistance and improved germination. If you’re wanting a uniquely colored tomato to top your pizza with, look no further than Chef’s Choice Green. The tomato produces beautiful green fruits with subtle yellow stripes. Enjoy the citruslike flavor and a perfect tomato texture.
Check out the ultimate guide to growing (and eating) zucchini.
Basil
Dolce Fresca basil has sweet, tender leaves that maintain an attractive, compact shape. The plant thrives in containers, borders or as a focal point in the garden. Select this basil if you need a drought-tolerant, hardy plant, are searching for a new and better basil or want great Mediterranean taste on your pizza.
Follow these tips to grow your best basil ever.
Originally Published: June 29, 2023
