You are asking questions that can't be answered.

How many hours per week is largely dependent on how much you care about weeds and watering and even whether you wish to spread some synthetic fert or build the soil organically.

Can tomatos and green peppers be grown in wide beds instead of rows? Certainly.

Spacing for most peppers in fertile soil is one per square foot, but more room for many hot peppers which grow larger than bell types.

Tomato spacing you may as well ask which football team is better :) There are those who grow them one per square foot and prune heavily and those who grow them with 20-30 sq ft each and don't prune anything and everything in between.

Lots of leeway there.

1. Is that bed space or does it include paths, and what covers the paths? 1000 sqft of beds is a big garden.
2. Are you going to water by timer or by hand/hose?
3. Tall & dense stuff (spaced closely) shades out most weeds, while low stuff like lettuce & open stuff like onions require lots of careful handwork.
4. What grew there last year - if there is a bumper crop of weeds about to explode, yer in trouble.
5. What are you mulching with?
6. If yer just downwind from a native meadow, yer screwed.

You can do 2 rows of peppers in a 4' wide bed, but not tomatoes.

"Maintenance" may take 1hr/day. If you skip many days, you'll need to give more time than what you skipped.

Between watering, feeding, pest patrols, weeding, harvesting, spraying for pests and/or disease, mulching, soil amending, repairing any storm damage, etc. etc. etc. I agree with justaguy - no way to answer.

But I can say with fair certainty that the more hours you devote to it per week the better, healthier, and more productive the garden will be. But plant one that big and then only give it an hour a day? No way.

If you are retired as I am, it is easy. If you work in the home or have help it will be easier. If you are a lone gardener and have a full time job outside the home, it will be very tough to maintain a garden that large.

Dave

I had a 3000 square foot garden for several years and I can tell you, it was a full time job. And even then it tended to go to weeds before the summer was over. Just picking when everything was coming in at the same time took at least a couple of hours a day. I got smart finally and mulched it heavily which cut down on the time needed but it was still time consuming. You've got to love gardening or plan on selling produce to enjoy a garden that big. I'm down to around 100 square feet now and it takes minutes a week. Quite a change! LOL

Sandy

I always mulch, and that is a big time saver. It is also a good will saver. I lose it if I have to spend half my time in there weeding. Mulching done properly will be done once and eliminate weeding at least for the veggies where you plant a plant. The only really, really enjoyable time is harvesting. Planting is not bad either, but then you have to be there with your hose for a week or so every day and it gets old fast.

Drip saves a lot of time, as does a general, once a year manuring. Because of acid soil, when mulching or manuring I also spread wood ash. You are not going to squeeze the last pound of produce out of the garden, and you are not going to save every plant from a bug attack, but with a general mulching, manuring, and automatic irrigation, time spent in the garden is cut down by a half or so.

Just planting 1000 sq ft will take you about 8 hours plus another 8 hours of preparation.

If you have a tiller or if you mulch, then 1000 sq ft will take about 2 hours per week of maintenance up until you start to harvest. From that point, it will take about 4 hours per week.

These are just ballpark numbers with a LOT of variables.

DarJones

I plant my tomatoes in a 4' bed using 1 plant every 2'. I stagger the plants so that one row is 2'-2'-2'-2'. The second row spacing starts out 1'-2'-2'-2'-2'. This gives then enough room. I use large square cages and string cording across them on the diagonal as the plants grow to keep them corralled in the cages. Last year they were over 6'tall and spilled out over the top of the 5'cages. this year I have enlarged the beds so they are 28' long. We needed more tomatoes this year.

I put in a 1500sq ft garden last year, but only about 500 was planted. This year I'll probably hit 1000.

Once the majority of the plants were in the ground last year, I got away with about 2hr per week maintenance, mostly weeding. It's all drip, which kept the weeds to a minimum.

I guess prep time for this spring will be about 20-40 hours. That includes pulling out weeds from the winter, adding compost, flushing drip lines, and planting. That doesn't include time spent going to the store, window shopping at the nursery, building my poor-man's greenhouse, or researching on the net, haha.

Mileage varies, I suppose. ;-)

yeah really a wide open kind of question. If you spend a fair amount of time setting up irrigation, newspaper the entire thing or mulch it, till until you are loathing it etc... amend it...etc. you can save a great deal of time when it is obscenely hot out in regards to weeding, feeding etc..but you still will end up spending a great deal of time monitoring plant growth/health, pests, this and that...There is a point of diminishing returns of course as far as labor hours go...but if you enjoy it then time is irrelevant. I put in an 80 ft by 60 ft plot last year in zone 5b, fence it dug 20 some odd 2.5ft holes for posts, tilled the entire thing etc...took tons of time, then the planting of 150 blueberry bushes over the last year...sure it took time, by hand even more so...but the pay off is always worth it. especially with asparagus, berry crops, etc...

love it don't loathe it, enjoy it and eat good. time outside is much more enjoyable than time inside.

j

I have about 500 sq feet in raised beds or a 900 square foot garden if we counted walk ways. My beds stay mostly weed free and except for a few hours planting most of my time is used in preserving food. I spend a couple of hours a week chasing bugs during the busy season because I don't do pesticides. Maybe an hour a month on composting. Preserving food can be labor intensive depending on how you want to process food. First setting up the beds was the most time consuming but if done properly than after that it is all picken and eatin.

I should have said "upwards" of 1 hr/day IF done most efficiently. And I don't count planting or harvesting as "maintenance." Maintenance in my mind is the expense that goes on between the investments of prep, planting, harvesting, and cleanup.

I had about 1000 sq. ft. garden last year. Tilling and getting it in shape - about 12 hrs./wk for three weeks.

Sowing and transplanting - 4-5 hours over a couple of weeks.

Weeding and maintenance: less than two hours a week, but when it needed watered I used a yard sprayer. It took three or four hours but I spent about 15 minutes.

Harvesting, 7-20 hours a week for over a month.

Processing the harvest: 20-30 hours per week for about a month.

Going to the store to buy tomatoes, tomato juice, green beans, carrots, peppers, onions, etc., zero hours per week for at least nine months.

Mike

For the most part, I don't think of it as "maintenance." I grab a cup of coffee in the morning and stroll around. Maybe I grab my favorite butcher knife, maybe I have my hoe. Pinch here, nip there, tuck, trim, bind, pull a weed or two. Maybe even get half-way through my coffee before the lid is covered in dirt or I just loose track of where I set it down.

Sure, there are times when there is a job to do, but there are fewer of those jobs because I do take my daily strolls, so am able to nip things in the bud....pun intended.

As was mentioned before, you really need to love doing this. If you think of it as work, then work it will be.
Kay