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Vegetable Gardening

Plant spacing in raised beds - advice ffrom the forum?

16 years ago

How closely can I plant my vegetables?

I have raised beds filled with 12 - 18" of 50% leaf compost and 50% good screened topsoil. Every year I add composted manure or Bumper Crop. The Ph, nitrogen, etc are all excellent. Everything seems to grow well over the years. The typical recommendations involve rows with 18 - 36" separations.That doesn't seem to make sense in a raised bed with quality soil.

I'm specifically looking to hear experiences with corn, onions, eggplant, and cucumbers.

I'd like to try corn spaced 1 plant per square foot. And onions 4" apart in rows 4" apart.

Any thoughts? Thanks

Scott

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Comments (5)

gardenman101
16 years ago
Scott, I also grow in raised beds. As far as corn go's, it depends on how many rows,colums you can get out of a raised bed. For perfect poilination of corn you should be able to get 4 rows by 4 rows for suffecient pollination, if you are doing standard 3 to 4' beds, I dont think you will get proper polilination (or at least in my past experience anyway) that is why I devote a specific 8' by 8' bed (minimum) and space corn 8" apart with rows 12" apart (have had good luck this way) onions you can do they way you have suggested, I have and have great results. Hope this helps. Plus with raised beds you can lessen most spacings and fit more in.

Mark
gaetanol
16 years ago
I had a similar question a short while ago. I have pasted the link. I got some good replies.

Here is a link that might be useful: SPACING link
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I did the exotic softneck garlic sampler this year with 4" spacing and they turned out great! Acropolis, Siciliano and Applegate stayed green the longest and they were quite large when I pulled them. Oregon blue was a weaker, smaller plant. I didn't get the others. Mabye be mine was a 4 pack?(One day I'll post this yews alliums crop in the gallery).I grew those and about 8 others in a 4x8 raised bed. I usually put my shallots cipollini in separate bed in part because I leave the shallots in longer, their roots might be more shallow, and they seem to need more water. Ditto the cippolini. OTOH, I think the shallots will be fine w/ 4" spacing, and the cippolini with 2". If you plant only a few cloves of each folic it could work.This is my fourth or fifth year overwintering various Cippollini & I've started to wonder if the time and space is worth the yield. They are "hecka" expensive to buy, but in a 2X4 block, I usually only end up with enough for one major recipe. MAYBE a pound. I didn't try choosing between alliums and tomatoes this year and both where in the ground in May. All the garlic where out my mid-June; the cippolini came outlast week and the shallots could come out any day now.
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Every year is a new experiment. This year I have densely planted maters in my 8x8 raised bed. I have 4 sections of tomatoes growing vertically: 4 Romas, 3 Big Boy (was more than that but I, uh, pruned off the main stem and they never recovered), 4 beefsteak, and 5 cherries (didn't know how prolific they were!). In the same bed I have 7 pepper plants (some of which are too shaded from tomato plants), 3 basil plants, some beets, carrots, and bush beans. I also stuck some lettuce seeds in the shade of the tomato plants. There's an 18" path right down the middle. So far, so good. I do not have the yield I see in some of y'all's photos, but it's not bad, either. The plants all seem to be healthy. Follow link for photos. In the fall I need to reorganize b/c the frame timbers are rotting. I'm thinking of using square foot spacing and am wondering if anyone here does that? I realize that some of the most successful people here do not - I'm thinking of those giant cages digdirt and others make - and of course the self-watering containers. Are there any square foot gardeners on this board? Pat Here is a link that might be useful: Pat's garden pics
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digit
16 years ago
Where my vegetable garden soil is fertile, deeply cultivated, and arranged in beds - plant spacing comes close to what these Purdue horticulturalists suggest.

Steve

Here is a link that might be useful: Small Plot and Intensive Gardening - 4 page pdf
ruthieg__tx
16 years ago
or look up square foot gardening and that should give you a good idea of how you can space things.
raisemybeds
16 years ago
In general you can plant much more intensively in a good raised bed setup that you can in traditional row gardening. I can get a dozen corn into a 3 by 3 bed NO PROBLEM and pollination is good (someone on this forum told me one year that you can really cram corn together if need be and he was right). Eggplant I do 6 to 8 plants around the perimeter of a 2.5 ft. diameter round bed and that is about maximum for that space. Your onion spacing sounds fine, you could even snug it up a little more. Cucumbers can be crowded like all heck - I do it every year. I have some 1 by 2 trellised beds in which I plant at least 6 cucumber seedlings at each end - so a total of 12 per bed. Good luck and learn from your experiments!

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