How We Use Square Foot Gardening And Intensive Planting

You could say that we are huge fans of intensive gardening techniques.  We use intensive gardening techniques in practically every aspect of our gardening efforts!

Many people’s introduction to gardening itself comes by way of a technique called “square foot gardening.”  It’s an intensive planting technique that promises to allow a huge amount of food in a very small space.

As experienced practitioners of the technique, we want to share our depth of knowledge about the subject.  It is and isn’t the growing mecca that everyone hopes for.

Falling Into The Square Foot Gardening Trap

When I first read Mel’s book on Square Foot Gardening, I remember thinking how it was going to revolutionize everything!  There were no other needed gardening methods!

I read every page of the book and by the following spring, had transformed one of my beds into a square foot gardening trial.  I followed the directions to a T, complete with “Mel’s Mix” and compost from five different sources!

Ignorance being what it is, I assumed everything in the book was true and possible.

That was one of the most chaotic and unsuccessful gardens in memory.

Onions growing next to tomatoes, broccoli shading out carrots.  Kohlrabi competing with kale, radish succumbing to zucchini.

Many things didn’t produce, or produced very little.

Turns out, it really isn’t possible to grow everything together in a small amount of space.

Plants aren’t these perfect little replicants that fit into neat little boxes.  No, they have life and grow all sorts of which ways, something not easily contained into a perfectly spaced method.

There’s a lot more finesse required and that’s what this post is leading up to.

A More Sane Approach To Intensive Gardening

If we could sum up what we’ve learned about intensive gardening, it’s to group plants by their general size.

We’ve learned to think of plants in terms of small, medium and large.  When these plants co-exist with one another, they should be planted near and among other plants of similar size.

Small plants should be near other small plants.  Medium plants near medium.  And large?  Well, maybe there’s a better way.

Likewise, some plants grow very differently from one another.  There’s no arguing the difference between a rooted carrot and a tomato plant that can grow 10 feet in the air!

We’ve generally found it good to plant root vegetables with other root vegetables.  Leafy plants among leafy plants.  Vining plants, like cucumbers and tomatoes, can share space with other plants.  But, you have to take care to offer them a trellis to grow tall and not shade out other plants!

The Reality of Large Plant Spacing

There are just certain plants that are going to grow larger than others.  If you put these in and around smaller plants, they will eventually shade them out and cause problems in your square foot garden.

In our humble opinion, these plants are poor candidates for square foot gardening in general.

We almost exclusively grow our large vegetables either in-ground or in containers.  This allows us to offer them the spacing they really need!

In fact, growing these larger plants in raised beds is a poor proposition.  Their size demands a lot of soil space and since soil costs in raised beds are typically high, these are good candidates for other methods.

That’s not to say that large plants can’t be planted intensively, though!

We discuss extensively how we handle many of our larger plants in our “core techniques” guide in more depth, but we’ll touch on it here.

Larger plants are best left to either container gardening or in-ground gardens.

In both our container gardens and in-ground gardens, our large plants are still planted intesively.  Instead of “square foot gardening,” we opted to space our plants at 18″ from one another.

For example, our outdoor container gardens use 18 inch spacing:

Our greenhouse also uses 18 inch spacing, a common spacing requirement for everything we grow in here:

Most of our large plants are planted 24 inches from each other in our in-ground garden!  In this case, we chose 24 inches because it was flexible enough for any large plant we’d want to grow!

And for our squash?  Also intensively planted.  Just with 36 inch spacing!  Squash need a lot of berth!

Even though we grow our herbs in containers, we still plant them intensively!  We often plant 4 or 5 herbs per bucket, which is almost a square foot.

Pretty much all the plants we grow are planted intensively, maximizing our growing space and soil utilization.  In fact, we chose the wide-raised row growing technique in our in-ground gardens for exactly this purpose!

The point is that we utilize different growing techniques to execute on intensive gardening more effectively.

If you note in the above pictures, we’re able to get two rows of plants in a single wide raised row.  This allows us to see every bit of every plant, plus get the most out of the space we have.

Think About The Sun And Plant Shading

Another topic that really isn’t discussed in Mel’s square foot gardening book is the general strategy of how you should go about planting intensively.

You probably know that the sun will largely be towards the south most of the summer.  Your garden might get great morning or evening sun.

If you’re planning an intensively planted bed, it’s good to think about how the sun will work with it.

Plants that have less height are planted towards the southern end.  Our beds get great evening sun exposure, so we also put larger plants towards the east.  A trellis is placed at the most northern point of the bed to grow tall plants.

In general, we try to get our smallest plants towards the southern extents of the bed, with the medium plants towards the north.

This will ensure that larger plants don’t shade smaller plants, which can negatively affect their growth.

In our case, we get better evening sun exposure on our beds, so we also focus larger plants towards the eastern side of the bed, ensuring they won’t shade out other plants from evening sun.

Utilize Different Size Growing Beds

In Mel’s book, he frequently uses the 4 foot by 4 foot bed as the basis for his methods.

He also teaches that it’s good to not have any bed where you can’t reach plants within two feet of the edge of the bed.

This is great advice, particularly the bit about not having to reach more than 2 feet into a bed.  But, we disagree about the 4×4 beds.

We’ve found it useful to have beds of different sizes.  When we built our current raised beds, we purposefully used beds of different sizes.

Some are 4×10.  Some are 2×10.  Others are 2×9.  They all follow the “2 foot reach” rule, but width and lengths were more tied to our desired needs.

What we ensured was that we had a full crop rotation plan.  We had two of each size bed.  This allows us to rotate crops completely between beds each year.

Additionally, the increased size allowed us to meet our production goals.  Walkways are wasted space, in our opinion.  Put simply, larger beds produce more food.

The different size beds allow us to easily integrate the “like with like” concepts we discussed above, while still reaching our desired production.

Planting Intensively Makes For More Food In Less Space

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our post about how we integrate square foot gardening and general intensive gardening techniques into our food gardens.

Intensive gardening is an incredible useful method, especially once you get past the limitations of “square foot gardening” in general.

We’ll reiterate that reading Mel’s book is a great introduction to the technique, requirements and general theory.  But, we want to temper people’s expectations to some degree.  We’ve been there, caught the fever and learned a ton because of it.

As always, if you have something to add or a question rattling around in your noggin’, feel free to slap a comment down below!