Super observant! We’ve played around with different spacings on basil and lately, have been favoring more dense plantings. We haven’t found it particularly sensitive to crowding, so it can be planted more or less densely. The main reason we plant more densely is because we only grow one bucket’s worth of each type, in our greenhouse, and this allows us to maximize our harvest with minimal space. If we had the room, we’d probably give our plants a bit more room and more aggressively prune them to be more bushy.

We grow all of our peas outdoors in raised beds. We’ve found this to be quite adequate and the raised beds warm the soil enough to keep these plants happy. Snap peas tend to be a mid-season crop, producing about 45-60 days (peak of summer) after we sow them. All of our greenhouse plants, however, are all full season crops and particularly those that will continually produce. Hope that helps!

Thanks for sharing your experience! There are definitely variables with gardening, but skill can be developed. It’s not a perfect substitute for luck (and patience, as you point out), but one can pursue a lot of different avenues given the time, money and motivation to do so. We’ve pursued a scale of trying to “optimize” the time, money and motivation aspects of gardening, which directly speaks to why we use different techniques. SFG is general is “high work, high reward,” but the gist of what we’re saying is that some things can be “low work, high reward” or “low work, low reward” and that’s OK. Good luck teaching your son, it’s great to hear you’re passing on your knowledge!

Aww, shucks! Thanks for the kind comment! We have thought about doing a book, so maybe some day! For now, our website is pretty comprehensive and the good thing is we can always add to or edit it!

For cilantro/coriander, we usually do four per square foot. In general, that’s how we treat all herbs. There might be some we’d consider treating differently, but we’ve grown dill, mint and other “large” herbs four per without difficulty. If we were in a warmer climate and longer season (say 5+ months), we’d knock it down to maybe one or two plants as the plants would tend to get much larger. We have a three month growing season, so they can only get so big. (Also, updated the oversight in this article!)

Thanks for your kind comment, we’re glad we could provide you a helpful resource!