How our garden looks this morning
I have to admit, I’m a sucker for any kind of vegetable grown in a row. A row of lettuce heads fills me with envy, and makes me think it must have been planted by a genius.
But rows are for farmers. Rows are for walking down. Rows are for driving tractors through. Rows are not for a city garden. We plant in squares.
Recently I was touring a couple of visitors around our front-yard garden here in the District of Columbia and when we came to the bed filled with bean plants one of them remarked, “Aren’t they awfully close together?” Indeed, my vegetables are planted close together, not the way the seed packets might advise you. My vegetable beds look chock full and a little crazy, not pretty or pleasing to the eye like neat rows.
A farmer friend who was visiting one day grasped our method right off. “You’re just using all your available space,” he remarked.
Exactly. By planting in squares, instead of rows, we use every available inch of garden soil to produce food. And you know what? I don’t think the plants mind. I think they are perfectly happy living much closer together than what the seed packets might recommend.
In the bottom of the photo above you see a bed of squash plants with pole beans climbing a trellis immediately behind them. You can hardly see the separation from the next bed, which is filled with three different kinds of bush beans, bordered in the rear by sunflower plants that eventually will grow 10 feet tall. In the next bed are our rhubarb plants, now in their third year. Behind them is a long row of okra that will grow up to six feet tall before summer’s over. The next bed contains two varieties of eggplant (on the right) and two very thick squares of zinnia and cosmos getting ready to bloom. Behind them I’ve planted nine different tomato plants. You can’t see them yet. And in the topmost bed we have several varieties of peppers, some basil (on the left) and in the rear four varieties of tomatoes being trained up rebar.
Besides making more effective use of our available space, vegetables planted tightly together in squares also become “self-mulching.” The foliage creates so much shade on the ground, weeds have much less chance of thriving and moisture in the soil in less likely to evaporate. I have not used any mulch in the garden this year. But we are also benefiting from the thick layer of compost we spread on the beds in the spring. You’d hardly know it from the way the compost has subsided since then, but each of these beds received at least four inches of compost made from food scraps.
And here’s a secret about compost made from food scraps: no weed seeds.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
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