In this section we will discuss spacing of your plants, and how to accomodate them. Needless to say, different plants requre different space needs. This can be achieved through planting or thinning. Let’s start with those requiring the most space. This would include your vining plants, like squash (summer, winter, and zucchini). The require a space 3 squares by 3 squares, or nine squares total.
Some plants will require two adjacent squares. These include watermelons, cantelopes, pumpkins,and smaller vining plants.
The next more densely planted scheme is those that require one square foot. These include tomatoes, peppers, okra, everything from the cabbage family— including , of course, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower,and brussel sprouts (yum!).
This is followed by those plants requiring four per square. You can achieve this spacing by dividing the square in half in each direction with your finger, creating a plus-shaped shallow groove. Plant one seed or plant in each square you have created! The types of plants used here would be bush type lettuce like bibb or buttercrunch. Also garlic, corn, leeks.
The next more densely planted square is divided into 9 squares. You can achieve this by drawing a tic-tac-toe board into the square, creating 9 equal spaces. The type of vegetables going here will be bush-style green beans, beets, turnips, spinach, and onions.
This brings us to a square divided into 16 smaller squares. You can do this by dividing the square like you do the 4-per-square, then divide each square into 4. The plantings you will do here are carrots, radishes, smaller onions. Carrots and radishes have very tiny seeds. You may do what I do, which is to scatter the seeds over the square, then thin when they get an inch tall or so.
There are a few specialty plantings, such as peas and sugar snap peas, and cucumbers. These are planted 4 to 6 in a square, but since they will be trained onto a trellis, they are planted all in a row in the middle of the square.
Since this is just a beginning discussion, we won’t go into what plants go best with what plants. There are a few things to take into consideration here, though. When planning those plant that will need to be trellised, you need to consider how much daylight will get to the rest of the square. Also, be careful that your bushier plants won’t overwhelm you more delicate plants, such as lettuces.
A great and inexpensive trellis frame that we use is made from ellectrical conduit. It can be cut at your big box store (we use 6 foot long uprights and of course just under 4 foot ong crosspiece. You will also need a corner connecter, which is just screwed into place. Just screw the corners on, set it into place , centering in the square at either end of the garden, and hammer it down about a foot or so. This will accomodate four adjacent squares. Later we will talk about stringing the trellis onto the frame.
More pictures from the garden next time! See you, and thanks for the comments!