I tried gardening in medium to heavy shade. I tried lettuce, mint, and basil. None of them worked. Lettuce was leggy and kind of okay but it was really small. Mint just died. Same with basil.

I would not recommend it.

I threw a spider plant and a golden pothos in that same shade and they love it. They're not edible though.

Not much in the way of vegetables will be productive in heavy shade - but what do you mean by medium shade? I grow quite a few things that only get about 6 hours of direct sun. They are leggier and less productive than my neighbors garden in 10 hours of sun, but its what I have to work with.

My medium shade is any wheres between 4 and 6 hours of sun. Thanks for the response so far, guess ill do contianers and just move them around. I do have alot of sun where my garden is now, just was hopeing to expand. And it is to expensive to remove the remainin trees that would open up the back yard to more sun.

In 6 hours of sun you can grow just about anything, like peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash., herbs

In 4 hours you can grow mints, cilantro, chives, parsley, onions.
If you have warm weather , that would be and added advantage. But the cooler it is, the harder it gets.

Ty for the responses, Ill try a few 4x4 raised beds and see what happens. If it does not go well ive lost very little and if it does go well I will post results so others can decide weather to shade garden. Thanks again.

I have successfully grown collards in full shade. Cardoons also, but they were quite a bit smaller than average. Smallage is rampant in full shade, and horseradish and mustard greens are decent.

Rather than remove entire trees, think about thinning out some branches. I have oak trees blocking sun to some areas and I bought a good tree saw and attached it to some long poles. I've been using it to cut out high branches, ones with large clumps of leaves. The idea is to let the sun shine through part of the tree where it normally wouldn't. You might be able to pick up an extra hour or two of sunlight this way.

I tried to grow different things in the shade... I ended up cutting my big trees, that gave shade to my garden area. Results are very good. Also, I want to point you to one sample... My garden is multi-leveled, so I have concrete stairs going down, facing south-east. Last year I found a small lettuce plant right on the stairs. I thought, there is a crack and seed from my flowered lettuce got into it and started to grow. It was pretty dry and sunny spring, despite luck of water lettuce continued to grow with the normal speed, so at certain point I decided that i don't want it to crack my stairs even more, so I need to pull it out. I started to pull and whole plant including the soil-less root appeared in my hand immediately and very easy. Where it was, it was just a small piece of cut grass from last year. Really small, like 20-clippings, all dry. And THERE WAS NO CRACK in the steps. So basically, that plant was growing with no nutrition, other then in the seed itself, no water, and FULL sun. I replanted it in the vegetable bed and it developed into good mature plant. So SUN is a most important thing you can give to your plants, especially morning sun. If your middle-shade area gets morning sun - use it. If it is afternoon sun - I wouldn't spend time and money on it.

Ty for the responses, Ill try a few 4x4 raised beds and see what happens. If it does not go well ive lost very little and if it does go well I will post results so others can decide weather to shade garden.

Try containers there first. Then if they work you can make the effort and cost to build the beds. The odds are against you for quality as well as quantity so why spend the work and costs of the beds if it isn't going to work with containers?

Dave

I haven't tried it myself, but I've been told that Swiss chard is very tolerant of shade.

Most so called "cool crops" are tolerant of shade :
--ONIONS, CHIVES, LEEKS, PARSLEY, CILANTRO, CHARDS, LETTUCE ..., SAGE, OREGANO, TARRAGON

I would add spinach, mint and mustard greens to the list of good shade crops, especially if you have hot summers. If you can have dappled sun, especially if it's only lightly dappled, then you might find more options would work well.