Growing your own food is satisfying and a healthy and eco-friendly way of living. Even with a small space, you can have an edible garden that produces fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers. However, before you start planting, preparing your garden for a bountiful harvest is essential. In this article, we'll share tips on how to transform your small space into a productive small space garden.
1. Evaluate Your Space
The right combination of location, growing conditions and plants will help you succeed in gardening. To maximize your small garden for an abundant yield, select a site that provides 6 to 8 hours of sunlight, has well-draining fertile soil and easy access to a water source.
Your space may be limited but your choice of plants is not. Along with several culinary herbs, in a small edible garden you can successfully grow many vegetables and fruits, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, cucumbers, carrots, onions, strawberries and a variety of edible flowers, such as lavender, nasturtium, pansy and rose.
Determine the Size of Your Garden Area
Before creating a garden plan, take inventory of the available growing space by calculating your garden's square footage. This is essential knowledge for determining garden bed sizes, the number of plants or seeds to plant in them, and the amount of fertilizer necessary for feeding your edibles.
Observe the Amount of Sunlight in the Garden
Many veggie plants need 6 to 8 hours of direct sunlight to thrive. Check your space throughout a day to see which areas have the most sun exposure.
Check Soil Quality and Drainage
Soil is the garden's foundation, and healthy soil is the key to gardening success. Make sure to plant edibles in rich, loamy, and well-drained soil with a pH between 6 and 7.
2. Plan Your Garden
Decide What You Want to Grow
Decide what you like to eat, explore what plants grow well in your hardiness zone, and which ones will fit in your garden. Use this information to create a planting plan—a simple diagram of the garden indicating where each plant will go.
Plan According to Each Plant's Needs
Many home gardeners with smaller plots looking for more growing space forgo rows in favor of square-foot gardens in raised beds. Gardening in beds makes more efficient use of available space in small gardens, maximizing crop production so gardeners can grow more food in a smaller footprint. For example, a 4 x 4 foot raised bed may not look like a lot of space, but it's possible to pack a lot of plants into one. Its small footprint provides 16 square feet of growing space. By adding trellises and other supports, gardeners can grow vertically to maximize the small space growing area even more.
Sometimes called intensive gardening, this method efficiently utilizes every square inch of space to cultivate a variety of crops throughout the season. It involves strategically spacing synergistic plants near each other yet far enough apart that they don't compete for resources and stunt growth. Their fully mature leaves may touch, forming a natural canopy of living mulch to protect the soil from drying out and eroding and help suppress weeds from germinating. The intensive approach makes efficient use of resources with less labor. It also allows gardeners to plan for successive plantings, staggering harvests on the same bed to double or triple yields.
When combining different types of plants, choose those with the same growing requirements for water, sun and fertilizer. Heat-loving plants like rosemary that favor dry soil would not be compatible with cucumbers that require a lot of water. Combine all-sun or all-shade plants to prevent a faster-growing variety from overtaking its companion.
Maintain Diversity in the Garden
Just like us, plants thrive in harmonious relationships. Think of the garden as an ecosystem where diversity promotes cooperation among different species to enhance the health of everything in the garden.
Consider Companion Planting to Maximize Yield and Minimize Pests
Planting edible flowers and herbs, vegetables, and fruits creates an ornamental and edible garden and the variety offers a welcoming habitat for beneficial insects. There is ample anecdotal evidence that planting mutually beneficial plants closely together enhances pollination and productivity and deters pests. A method of mixed intercropping often used in small gardens, companion planting involves planting two or more varieties of plants together to achieve a reciprocal benefit.
Interplanting several plants with similar growth patterns is a great way to maximize a small garden plot. Native Americans traditionally intercropped corn, pole beans, and squash together in what became known as"Three Sisters." Because of their similar growth habits, the three plants grow harmoniously in the same space without competing for water and nutrients. Beans are nitrogen-fixers, while the corn stalks provide structure for the climbing beans, and the large leaves of low-growing squash plants shade the ground to maintain soil moisture and suppress weeds.
Some plants interact in positive ways, while others, like carrots and dill, do not. And some emit a chemical that inhibits the growth of nearby plants. Interplanting fragrant plants, such as sage or rosemary, may distract insect or animal pests from other edible crops.
Vegetables That Grow Well Together
- Basil and tomatoes
- Radishes and lettuce
- Peas and carrots
- Pumpkins or squash and corn
- Beets and onions
- Potatoes and eggplants
See Burpee's Companion Planting Chart to select the best varieties to plant or not to plant together.
Practice Succession Planting to Provide Continuous Yields
By planting varieties that mature at different times, a small plot will provide a continuous bounty of crops throughout the season. Try matching slow-growing, large vegetable plants with faster-growing, smaller ones, such as 'Space Hybrid' spinach, which grows in 40 days or less. While the larger plants require wide spacing between them to accommodate their mature sizes, the smaller, fast-growing ones can fit in the spaces between the larger plants. The fast-growing plants will be ready to harvest before the bigger plants shade them out, and in the meantime, will provide good ground cover to maintain soil moisture and suppress weeds.
When cultivating quick-growing early-season crops such as radishes alongside later-season crops like carrots, the earlier-sprouting radishes will help loosen the soil for the later-maturing carrots. Once you harvest the cool-season crops, your warm-season crops will be ready to take up the extra space. After harvesting the radishes, consider planting warm-season transplants like tomatoes or peppers.
Peas, beans, cabbage and greens can be planted and harvested in both seasons. Spring cabbages are versatile; think of picking half the crops as young spring greens, then leaving the rest to produce the dense heads. After a late summer harvest of peppers or cucumbers, there will likely be time to squeeze in a fall planting of lettuce or kale.
Gardeners may also optimize a small space garden by planting serial patches of the same plant, such as lettuce, every few weeks. The lettuces will mature at different times to offer a continual supply of tasty greens for your salad bowl.
3. Preparing the Soil
Whether you are starting your first edible garden or have been tending one for ages, the first and single most important step is properly preparing the soil. So your fruits and vegetables aren't forced to compete with unwanted plants, begin by clearing any debris and weeds from the garden. Remove all undesirable vegetation (including roots!) by hand using a sharp tool such as a garden spade.
Add a Layer of Organic Matter
Your soil test should have revealed the soil pH and any nutrient deficiencies, enabling you to make necessary adjustments. To give your garden a healthy start, apply 2 to 3 inches of rich organic matter such as compost, aged manure or worm castings. The compost will improve moisture retention and drainage, provide essential nutrients, and enhance the soil structure.
Lightly Till or Loosen the Soil
Using a flat spade and a garden fork, lightly till or loosen the soil to a depth of 6 to 8 inches, working the compost thoroughly into the top 3 to 6 inches of soil. This effort will accomplish a few critical things. It will break up any clumped soil so plants and their roots can more easily grow; it will integrate the compost into the soil to disperse valuable nutrients; and it will aerate the soil to facilitate faster plant growth. Avoid working soil that is too wet, as it can damage the structure. To check if the soil is dry enough for tilling, take a handful and squeeze it into a ball. If it crumbles in your hand with gentle pressure, the soil is dry enough to till.
4. Choosing Your Plants
Your garden will thank you for combining fruits, vegetables, culinary herbs, and edible flowers in the same plant bed. Embrace your small space garden by choosing plants well suited to its size. When selecting appropriate plants for your growing zone, consider your garden's sun exposure and access to water. Explore varieties explicitly bred to grow in tight spaces, such as the high-yield, early-bearing 'Sweetheart of the Patio' tomato or the 'Sunburst' hybrid squash.
Compact plants with small root systems, including dwarf varieties, are uniquely suited to small gardens. Bush-type plants, like the 'Salad Bush Hybrid' cucumber, typically take up a third of the space as their larger siblings while still delivering full-sized produce.
Miniature vegetables are a good fit for small gardens because you can space the plants closer than their full-sized relatives.
To minimize cultivation problems, increase yield, and make the garden experience a little easier, consider planting disease-resistant edibles like the hardy determinate 'Celebrity' tomato hybrid.
Seeds or Seedlings?
When planning your edible garden, you'll need to decide whether to start plants from seed indoors, directly sow seeds in the ground, or plant transplants. Each method has advantages and disadvantages depending on the vegetable and the time of year. Some factors to consider are time, space, cost, and the best growing method for the particular plant.
Where you garden will also influence the growing method. Some plants require several months to fully mature. If you are in an area with a short growing season, there won't be enough time to directly sow slow-maturing plants like tomatoes.
You can directly sow tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, but they are best planted as transplants. Root vegetables such as carrots, beets and turnips are not well-suited for transplanting as the process can damage their delicate roots. However, corn, basil, lettuce, peas, spinach, zucchini, beans, melons, carrots, beets, and radishes do well when directly sown into the soil. Others, like squash and cucumbers, can be planted either way.
Starting seeds is often more economical, but some crops, like potatoes, are grown from last season's tubers rather than seeds. Onions can grow successfully from seed, sets, or transplants. Growing onions from seeds may be the most economical method and offers the greatest choice of plants, but it requires starting them 10 to 15 weeks before the anticipated transplanting date. Alternatively, it's easy to plant onion sets—small onion bulbs grown from seed in the previous season—and some gardeners choose to plant onions as transplants.
5. Planting Your Edible Garden
Spacing depends on the particular plant and the size of your planting area, but knowing the plant's mature height and width is an excellent place to start. Different growing methods have different spacing and depth requirements. For example, gardeners can space plants closer together in raised beds than in traditional in-ground rows.
Ensure Proper Depth and Distance Between Plants
Generally, plant shallow-rooted plants such as lettuce greens and herbs a minimum of 6 inches deep. Medium-rooted plants like carrots, radishes, celery, and peppers need at least 12 inches of soil. In contrast, deep-rooted plants, including tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and zucchini, require a minimum of 18 inches of soil depth. Here is a good reference for the recommended distance between plants.
The intensive planting method allows for greater production in a small garden. However, the demand on the smaller space requires feeding and replenishing the soil regularly with nutrient-rich compost.
Water Seedlings After Planting
Seedlings need frequent light watering to establish roots. Water seedlings thoroughly every morning as close to the soil level as possible so water percolates several inches down to the new roots. Because their roots are close to the soil surface, young seedlings do not need the deep soaking that more mature plants require. Mulch around new plants to conserve moisture and prevent weeds.
6. Maintaining Your Garden
While awaiting a bountiful harvest, regularly completing a few basic tasks will significantly increase the chances of success. A gardener's essential checklist should include the following:
Maintain Healthy Soil
Soil is the garden's life support system. It anchors roots, holds water and stores nutrients. But it can't do this on its own. Gardeners must keep soil healthy by composting, mulching, controlling weeds and amending it as needed. All plants need nutrients to flourish, especially the primary three— phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium. To remove the guesswork, feed vegetables as needed with a balanced organic fertilizer specially formulated just for them.
Water Consistently
An edible garden needs consistent watering. Water deeply but less often, about one inch per week, to establish deeper roots as the plants mature. Too little water can stunt growth and produce poor yields, but over-watering can cause root rot and fungal diseases.
Plants will need more water during heat or dry spells and less when there's plentiful rainfall. Stick your finger down into the soil to determine if your plants need watering. If it feels dry 2 to 4 inches down, it's time to water.
Eliminate Damaged and Dead Plant Material
Using clean shears, prune and remove damaged or diseased foliage and deadhead spent companion flower blooms to encourage greater blossom production.
Conduct Regular Health Checks
Pests and diseases are anathema to gardeners and their plants, but these menaces can be managed. To keep gardening a pleasurable pursuit rather than a tedious task:
- Stay on top of things with regular health checks.
- When monitoring edibles for disease symptoms from bacteria, fungi, or viruses, look for telltale signs on leaves such as discoloration, spots, mottled patterns, wilting or curling.
- If you spot any problems, take immediate action to prevent significant damage and give plants a chance to bounce back to health.
Starting an edible garden in a small space requires some preparation, but it can be a rewarding experience. By evaluating your space, planning your garden, preparing the soil, choosing the right plants, and planting and maintaining your garden, you can enjoy a bountiful harvest of fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs throughout the season. With good plant choices, care, and attention, you can transform your small space into a productive and beautiful edible garden.