Hey all,

For the summer I'd like to take on a couple of plants (and beyond), perhaps one indoors and a couple of outdoors. Does anyone know some good plants to start out with?

I've been given some Petunia seeds so I'm going to start out with those, I was thinking about some sort of cactus for indoors (or perhaps a mint/herb plant), although at this point I'm looking for advice - what's best for a beginner?

Outdoors, a bay tree or rosemary bush would do well, in a pot or in the ground, rosemary also having delicate blue flowers about this time. Californian poppies are very easy to look after, bright and colourful (orange, mainly, although there is a homozygous recessive for white) for most of the summer, but self-seeding, so can get a little out of hand after a few years. Alternatively, a fritilaria is good (it is a bulb), with exotic-looking flowers and also smells of weed.
Indoors, herbs are great, particularly if you like to cook, and it can be interesting (to one with such a low excitement threshold as me) to see how long you can keep the cheap pots of herb you can get from supermarkets alive for, with plenty of watering and feeding. Mint is good, as are chives (which can be planted outdoors), basil, sage, coriander, and thyme and oregano if you can find them. Of these, basil and sage require the most attention, the others being more hardy and cope better with drier conditions.
If you want more decorative indoor plants, christmas cacti are great, and can take all types of abuse (being a cactus), but also flower quite regularly. And if you really want to make things exciting (I did warn you), you could splash out on an orchid, which are completely different to look after, and are frequently killed by over-attention.

On reflection, not all of those were for beginners, but there were some good starting points. Also, outdoors, you can grow your own tomatoes, in growbags, especially if you have a good south facing wall, although they will require a lot of watering.

When I was a kid we used to help dad in the garden and plant lots of pansies, sweet peas, snap dragons, that kind of thing. We seemed to manage without killing them off. I fancy (when I move) getting a mini greenhouse and growing my own chilli peppers.

I'll second tomatoes, they do seem to grow very well (by far the most successful thing in our garden) and they taste so much better than shop bought ones. Even Tesco's Finest range don't come close to comparable. It actually makes life difficult when they're not producing because you have to survive with such sub-standard produce. It should be pointed out that outside of meat, tomatoes are probably my favourite foods.

if you want bang for your buck, plant a bag of sunflower seeds. they grow dead quick as well so you don't have to wait around

Pumpkins!

Throw them in the ground and forget about them - they're pretty damn close to a weed, and produce a LOT of pumpkins.

If you've had enough of them though, they're really easy to remove - unlike weeds of course.

Very easy, and very rewarding with the kilos of food they produce. Wrong time of year tho atm.

I've got a good crop of pitcher plants, a nepenthes, a cobra lily (although it might be a weed - it hasn't grown enough yet to be sure) and a couple of chilli plants, all doing well.

I've currently got a banana plant indoors that I've systematically failed to kill since I moved into this house, much to my surprise.

If you want low maintenance for the garden then a budlia is good (although they really are virtually impossible to kill and grow like nobodies business once established, hack back almost to the ground once the summer is over, spring ideally and watch as is bounces back). Very good if you want to attract bees and butterflies to your garden.

As for annual plants pansies and sweet peas are very easy to grow and give very nice flowers. Sweet peas are very fragrant in particular.

Spider plants are pretty tolerant as well.

What's your garden like? Temp, soil type, drainage, rainfall?

I'm going for pots with compost - the garden is the domain of my mum.

Try Lovage - it's hardy, easy to grow, grows insanely fast and tastes fantastic with chicken / pork / oily fish.

Combine with Lemon Balm for gorgeous tangy sauces.

They're also both magic for IBS.