Small Garden Solution
Tuesday, January 17th 2012 @ 12:35 AM
One of the reasons people tend to use to not grow their own vegetables is that they don’t have the space to make it worth their while. For these folks I recommend the Square Foot gardening approach made popular by Mel Bartholomew. It acknowledges the fact that a lot of space is wasted with traditional row-based gardens. Row-based gardens tend to waste 60–80% of the potential growing space.
Using the Square Foot gardening method, the garden space is divided into beds (either raised or dug in to the lawn). Each bed is 4' x 4' (16 sq ft) or 120cm x 120cm (1.4m²). Each bed is separated from its neighbours by paths. A good overview of building a Square Foot garden can be found here.
The next step is to take each bed and to divide it down into one-square-foot sections. It is important to put up some sort of physical divider be it strips of wooden lath or garden twine. The standard for planting is one plant per square for larger plants such as broccoli and basil, four per square for medium large plants like lettuce, nine per square for medium-small plants like spinach, and sixteen per square for small plants such as onions and carrots. You can find a list of plants and their appropriate spacing here.
The more I look at the benefits of Square Foot gardening the more sense it makes to me. As the soil doesn’t get compacted by walking, the way it does in a row garden, it remains loose and friable. The plant density means that there is little space for weeds, and shade cast by your plants also keeps new weeds from growing. By having loose or friable soil, it retains water better. It also allows you to get the water very near the plant roots so that less water is wasted. By employing a companion planting approach, you can also protect your garden from a variety of pests. The final benefit is that by having a lot of different plants in close proximity is that there is less chance of diseases spreading through your garden.
I am planning on experimenting with this approach in some of our raised beds this year to optimize my harvests from each of them, while keeping my water bills down.
