When it’s time to plant veggies, it’s easy to get overzealous! Sure, you’d love a pumpkin patch, but do you really have room for that? And how many of those can you really use? Planning your veggie garden is about using space wisely, giving room to the plants you know you will eat. HGTV’s Erin Napier takes a practical approach. In an interview with Southern Living, she shared that planting a salad garden is just right for her. It’s filled with romaine lettuce, green onions, tomatoes, and dill.

There are plenty of tips for growing a healthy garden to think about when planting, but not getting overly ambitious is sage advice. Keeping it simple is an easy way to prevent getting overwhelmed or ending up with underutilized space. Devoting precious space to the plants you know you will use is critical to getting the most out of your vegetable garden, and allows you to focus your attention on the plants that really matter. Limiting the kinds of plants you grow can also cut down on maintenance and allow you to get good at growing the most-used veggies in your garden.

In an Instagram video shared by Southern Living, Napier said she likes being able to plan on cooking some kind of meat for dinner and then walking down to the garden to grab the essentials she needs to make a salad. For her, that means lettuce, green onions, and tomatoes. She throws in a bit of dill to add to her ranch dressing, and there you have it.

These veggies also have the benefit of being relatively easy to grow. Lettuces tend to be cool weather vegetables and don’t require full sun, so they are great for tucking behind taller vegetables that love to soak up the rays. They also come in many varieties, so you can grow entire heads of lettuce, or leaf lettuces that allow you to cut and come again. If you want to follow Napier’s lead, learn how to grow romaine lettuce in your garden.

Green onions are tasty in a salad, but there is also another benefit. You can grow green onions from the scraps of other green onions. Not only does this help cut down on food waste, but it lets you recycle the same onion over and over again. Gardening doesn’t get cheaper than that! And, of course, no salad is complete without tomatoes, but with so many options it can be tough to pick the right variety. If you’re not sure which tomatoes to spend your time growing, check out these alternatives to tasteless tomatoes at the garden center.

Lettuce, tomatoes, and onions may form a good base for salad, but after a few dinners, you may be looking to spice it up a bit. The good news is that there are plenty of other salad essentials you can easily grow at home. Start by mixing up the types of greens you grow. Adding arugula, spinach, or mustard greens will let you spice up the base of your salad with new flavors and ensure you always have something growing.

Cucumbers are another great salad staple, and because they vine, you don’t need a big garden to grow cucumbers. Carrots can present a bit more of a challenge for gardeners, especially once summer kicks in. If you want to add these to your salad garden, get our master gardener’s advice on growing carrots in the summer heat.

Basil makes a great companion plant for tomatoes, so it’s worth planting even if you don’t eat it. However, you can also use it to branch out into Caprese salads. Really, any herb you love is worth growing because they are both versatile in the kitchen and beneficial for repelling pests in the garden. If you have the room, it’s always worth adding a few herbs into the veggie garden.