Growing fruit and veggies can bring gardeners a lot of joy. There is nothing quite as satisfying as eating your own produce. The problem is that some food is much easier to grow than others. For beginner gardeners, the wrong choices can lead to not only frustration but also loss of confidence and enthusiasm. Due to this, it’s best to start off with the easiest fruit and veggies to grow. These foods will help you get beautiful harvests with minimal difficulties. Due to this, it’s vital to know the easy from the difficult. There are fruits and vegetables that even expert home growers don’t bother with, not just because they are difficult, but because their requirements can be extreme.

As someone who runs their own gardening business, I have a huge amount of experience in growing food, both for business and personal use. However, there are foods that I either can’t or won’t grow. This can be because I live in a fairly mild climate, but also because their requirements can take time and space away from growing other plants. Some plants in this list can be an interesting project once you have experience, but even they often come with significant challenges. There are many great fruits and veggies to grow as a beginner gardener, but here are 10 you should avoid.

The avocado has gained a huge amount of popularity this decade, mainly due to it being extremely nutritious. When I was a gardening beginner, one of my first thoughts was how I could grow my favorite food. If you’re thinking something similar, you’ll be disappointed. Many of the foods in this list are slow growers, but avocado takes that to a new level. Even in good conditions, it can take at least five years for the tree to bear fruit, sometimes much longer. You can add a graft from a mature and fruiting variety as a shortcut, but this is incredibly difficult to do and takes away the fun that comes with growing from seed.

These trees also need specific conditions in which to thrive, as they’ll do best in subtropical climates where they have access to full sun. If you live in an area where it can freeze in the winter, these trees will need to be kept indoors or in a heated greenhouse. Even if you have ideal conditions, pollination can be difficult as they require cross-pollination in the wild. This can be done by hand instead, but requires expert timing. They also attract common pests such as mites and weevils. In short, there is nothing easy about growing an avocado plant. You could give the plant many years of patient care, only to never be rewarded with a fruiting tree.

Unless you live in an area that never has frost in winter, citrus trees are a no-go for your garden. It is possible to grow them indoors, but this can come with some difficulties. They ideally need at least eight hours of sunlight a day, so they would need to be placed in a large south-facing window. If that’s not possible, their growth would need to be assisted by grow lights. You can move the plant back outside during the summer, but this adds extra levels of complexity. Watering requirements aren’t simple either, as citrus plants hate being waterlogged but also hate being dry. This means you need to constantly keep the water moist, which can be difficult in containers.

Then we get to a common theme on this list: the time it takes until harvest. For a fruit tree grown from seed, it can take up to 15 years until you get results. Due to this, many prefer to buy pre-grown citrus trees, especially ones that have been grafted with a mature tree. Unless you have the right environment, it can be an uphill battle just to keep the tree alive. If you want to take on a project, using the seeds from kitchen scraps can be a fun idea. However, you need to be realistic that getting to the point where you can harvest citrus fruit is a long and challenging road.

Celery is another fussy plant that is more trouble than it is worth for beginners. While it can be grown from your kitchen scraps, it’s not a quick win. The time from seeding to harvesting with celery can be as long as 140 days. In comparison, there are some varieties of lettuce that can be harvested in as few as 28 days. That long growing season becomes a problem when you add in how it’s extremely sensitive to temperature changes. As with cauliflower, most climates will either get too cold or too hot during its growing time, and the plant will bolt. It means they have to be grown in a controlled climate if you want guaranteed growth.

That sensitivity also extends to its watering requirements, as the soil needs to be constantly moist and packed full of nutrients. If you mess up these needs, the stalks can easily become bitter. The plants are even sensitive to transplanting, and therefore, putting your seedlings into the ground can shock the plant. Even if you do manage to get everything right, you may end up being underwhelmed by your harvest. You’re unlikely to get the tall and perfectly uniform stalks you get from the store. There are far more forgiving vegetables to grow as a beginner that won’t constantly demand your attention.

Cauliflower is a crop that you may expect to be easy to grow, but the reality is very different. Whereas a lot of the foods I mention here require plenty of heat and sunlight, a cauliflower is quite the opposite. It needs consistently mild temperatures in which to grow a large head and is annoyingly sensitive to temperature changes. All plants ultimately want to spread their seed, but can aim to do this in several different ways. Cauliflowers do this by rapidly growing a flowering stalk when it gets too hot. This generally happens when temperatures go above 75 degrees Fahrenheit. When this happens, the vegetables become bitter.

Other forms of stress, such as inconsistent watering or a lack of nutrients, can also severely affect growth. It only grows one head, and it’s very easy to end up with a cauliflower that is barely edible. None of this is helped by a long growing season where natural temperatures are almost certain to fluctuate. Pests are also another problem as they can attract a wide range of unwelcome visitors, including aphids and slugs. All of this means that for perfect growth, you often need to take measures such as netting and shading the head from sunlight. Many other plants can bolt too, such as lettuce and broccoli, but aren’t as sensitive and don’t have the high-maintenance demands of a cauliflower.

For beginner gardeners looking for easy wins, there are plenty of options out there that won’t take a long time to grow. Brussels sprouts aren’t one of them. That’s a shame, as these vegetables are one of the most visually stunning plants to grow, with their height and high yields. That height does come with some issues, as they need plenty of space for good airflow and to get good sunlight. They’ll also need staking to support their growth and protect them from the wind. As with others, the long growing season here is not only frustrating, but it leaves a lot of space for things to go wrong.

Pests can be an issue with more or less every crop, but Brussels sprouts are one of the worst victims as they seem to attract almost every type of harmful critter. These issues can be helped by netting and regular application of pesticides, but that is next-level gardening beyond beginners. Any signs of stress can lead to poorly developed sprouts. The final nail in the coffin is that there is another plant that will bolt when it gets too hot. You’re not short on options if you want easy-growing greens, so stay away from Brussel sprouts unless you’ve mastered the rest.

One of the fun things to do around Halloween is to go picking in a real pumpkin patch. If you’ve ever done this, you’ll probably already have a good idea of what the issue is. Pumpkins need a huge amount of space to grow. Most fruit and vegetables are happy to grow vertically or underground, but pumpkins like to spread out. In terms of germination and harvest times, they are one of the easiest crops on the list. Yet, as they grow, headaches can quickly arise. The size means they can only be grown in the largest of garden beds, with no space to grow anything else there. You can plant them in the soil, but this may require a large amount of compost to get the soil quality required.

For beginner gardeners, the space pumpkins take up could be better used by growing several easier crops. This space issue can be exacerbated by their long growing season and need for warm weather. Due to their lack of height, they need to be in an open space to catch as much sun as possible. Pollination can also be another issue, as they have separate male and female flowers. This means pollen has to be carried from one plant to another. This can be achieved naturally through bees or the wind, or it can be done by hand. But this is yet another obstacle for beginners. Pumpkins are part of the cucurbit family, and if you want to start with a much easier variety, go for a zucchini instead.

Given that it’s one of the most produced foods in the world, it may seem curious to have it on this list. Many of us will have seen huge fields of corn that can grow impressively tall. It’s those features that make it difficult to grow in a beginner garden. Growing just one corn stalk doesn’t take up a lot of space, but natural pollination is almost impossible. That’s because they are wind-pollinated by each other. It’s for this reason that they need to be planted in grids instead of a single line. For effective pollination, you’ll need at least a dozen corn stalks. Therefore, the amount of space you need becomes quite big. As with pumpkins, hand pollination is possible, but this is beyond beginner-level gardening and doesn’t have any guarantee of success.

Due to their height, they are generally not suitable for garden beds. This means you need to ensure you have nutrient-rich soil for their hungry nutritional needs. Without constant fertilization and watering, you will also get poorly formed corn ears. Added to these needs, there is also the threat that a prolonged wet spell or pests can ruin your crop just as they are ripening. It’s one of those plants that initially looks as though it would be fun to grow, but you soon realize why they are best suited for vast farmlands.

Are you excited about growing your own food? If so, you probably want the buzz of growing a fast-growing crop that you can enjoy not long after planting. Garlic is the complete opposite of this. While not difficult to grow in terms of skill level, it has some serious downsides. To develop a proper bulb, a garlic plant needs to go through a cold period. This means it needs to go through a winter. Therefore, you need to plant it in the fall, but you won’t be able to harvest it until the summer. That is often a whole nine months later. It’s far from the quick win many beginner gardeners crave. There are many other quicker cold-weather crops that can be grown instead.

That long growth isn’t just about patience, but also the potential for other issues. The plant can get diseases or be subject to pests that can ruin the crop. This can be especially true if the garlic is sitting in soggy ground, which can be common in the colder months without excellent drainage. If you fail to meet its growing requirements, then you could be left with underdeveloped bulbs or ones that can’t be split into cloves. After nine months, that would be extremely disheartening. It’s satisfying when it works, but it’s a better idea for a beginner to learn easier crops first before taking on this long-term project.

When you find out how a pineapple grows, it makes you scratch your head, wondering how they are so cheap in stores. Unless you have a huge amount of spare time, garden space, and live in a tropical climate, it’s one of the most impractical plants to grow. It can be a fun project, but you need to be realistic about the difficulties. One of the biggest issues for beginners is that it can often take two or three growing seasons for the pineapple plant to bear fruit. After all that time and all that effort, you’ll only be rewarded with one solitary pineapple. The plant will then die off. It does leave offsets attached to it that can be replanted, but this means starting the process all over again.

As a means to grow your own produce, the effort-to-reward ratio is atrocious. Even if you do want to take on the project, you probably don’t have the climate for it. They are sensitive to frost, require consistently warm temperatures, and high humidity. For the U.S., these requirements can only really be found in Florida. For everyone above that latitude, you’d need a heated greenhouse. By the time you’ve grown one pineapple, a beginner gardener could have harvested an almost endless amount of other food. Even if it had simple growing conditions, it’s just not worth it unless you’re both curious and have a lot of patience.

A sunny vineyard in a rolling landscape can be a beautiful sight. You may dream of growing your own little version, but it can be extremely difficult. There is a common problem here in that grapes can take years to establish. You’re looking at least two to three years to get a harvest. As with many field crops, grapes require a lot of sunlight to grow to their full potential and also need support, such as from a trellis. This all requires a lot of space as well as carefully controlled growth. Being a perennial vining plant, they will continue to grow each year until they become a tangled mess. Due to this, they need to be expertly pruned at the end of each growing season.

Getting this pruning wrong can lead to big issues. Under-pruning can lead to overcrowding and poor-quality grapes, whereas over-pruning can damage the plant and reduce the grape yield. Doing this pruning perfectly takes time and experience to get right. Without the right experience, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the growth of a grapevine. They’ll also need near constant monitoring, as a range of pests and diseases can quickly take hold and destroy your crop. Raspberries have similar needs with support and pruning, and can give you a good experience before you move on to bigger challenges.