I'm thinking about making a small vegetable garden in my yard, but the area I have available only gets sun in the early morning hours. Do all vegetables need full sun or are there some that can tolerate partial shade?
It depends on the type of vegetable, but generally most of them need at least 6-8 hours of sun a day. If you only get morning sun you're probably under 6 hours, which is a bit low for most garden plants.
But it's not all lost. There are vegetables that tolerate partial shade pretty well: lettuce, spinach, arugula, chard and cabbage do fairly well even with less sun. Salads and herbs like parsley and mint manage fine with 4-5 hours. Tomatoes, peppers and eggplants on the other hand are way more demanding and struggle with low light. Zucchini and cucumbers are somewhere in the middle: they'd prefer more sun but if you've got at least 5-6 hours they could still work.
My advice is to start with shade-tolerant crops and maybe arrange your garden so the sun moves across the area as much as possible during the day. If you get morning sun from the east, during warm season the light comes from other directions too. Anyway, vegetables that grow mainly for their leaves (lettuce, cabbage etc.) need less light than fruiting ones, so at least you know where to focus.
It really depends on what you want to grow. I'd say that with just morning sun you can still have a vegetable garden, maybe not the more demanding vegetables like tomatoes or eggplants, but lettuce, spinach, arugula, cabbage and other leafy greens do really well even with 4-5 hours of sun.
The important thing is that the sun reaches directly, not filtered through the trees. Try measuring exactly how many hours you get and then pick your vegetables accordingly, it's not an impossible task.
In my garden I have exactly the same situation as you - sun only until mid-morning, and I'm telling you it works really well with lettuce, spinach, arugula and even zucchini if you put them in the least shaded spot! Tomatoes and eggplants, on the other hand, struggle - I've tried them and they grow slowly with few fruits. What I'd recommend is experimenting: start with leafy greens since they're very tolerant, then maybe add something else if you notice the sun reaches a bit more in certain times of the year!
Log into answer.
