Planning a Vegetable Garden

Posts Tagged ‘Raised Beds’

What kind of vegetable seeds should you plant for a small garden?  If you’re tight on space, you’ll want to carefully consider what seeds you plant.  Some vegetables grow into large plants that can take over a small space!

Vegetable Seeds and Variety

This topic actually has a double meaning.  Most people want a bit of variety to the vegetables they grow.  And it also refers to the variety of a particular vegetable.  For example, some tomato plants can go wild and grow 6 or more feet tall.  Other varieties are shorter and more compact (thus conserving growing space).  There are quite a few vegetable varieties that can be used successfully in a small space vegetable garden.

Here are some ideas that I have used for a small vegetable garden, in two sizes — 4′ x 4′ and 4′ x 6′.  Naturally, you won’t be able to grow a ton of different vegetables in these small space vegetable gardens, but you can certainly grow plenty.  You just need to know the varieties of vegetables that will work well for you.

If you indeed can only use a 4′ x 4′ space, please consider a raised bed vegetable garden.  Your veggies will grow better because of the deeper loamy soil.  Better growing translates to a larger harvest.

Vegetable Seeds for a 4′ x 4′ Garden

If you have just a 4′ x 4′ space, you won’t have a lot of room to spare.  One small garden type I recommend is a salad garden, which is wonderful for those hot Summer nights.

My favorite salad garden consists of the following:

• Tomatoes
• Lettuce and/or spinach
• Radishes

Where you need to be careful is with the varieties of tomatoes and cucumbers you grow; they are the two plants that grow largest.  That being said, here are the varieties of vegetable seeds I recommend for a 4′ x 4′ raised bed garden.

Tomatoes: Celebrity, Sweet Baby Girl, Better Bush Improved Hybrid.  All three are great choices, but my top pick of these three is Celebrity.  Since you can grow 2 tomato plants in a 4′ x4′ garden, why not add a second variety for, well, variety!

Lettuce: I recommend leaf lettuces over head lettuces, because you can pluck leaves as needed instead of waiting for a whole plant to get big enough. As long as you don’t pluck too many leaves at one time from a given plant, it will just grow more leaves to use later. Some of the lettuces I like are Red Sails, Simpson Elite. If you’re feeling adventurous, try Salad Bowl Mix.

Spinach: I love baby spinach leaves for a salad, and they are quite nutritous. Pick what you need from several plants, then let them keep developing new leaves for you! My favorite small-space spinach is Renegade.

Radishes: It’s so very amazing how fast these vegetables can grow! Plant them a week or two after the lettuce and/or spinach. As you harvest them, you can plant more seeds, for a continuing harvest. I love color in my salads, so my choice is Easter Egg Blend II.

In general, plant 2 tomatoes (diagonally from each other) and keep other plants 18″ away from them.  The fill in with radishes, lettuce and/or spinach, planted just a smidgen closer than specified on the seed pack.  After all, in a raised bed garden, you have the wonderful soil that enables you to place the vegetables a little closer than normal.

Vegetable Seeds for a 4′ x 6” Garden

In addition to the veggies specified above, I like to add cucumbers or summer squash to a 4′ x 6′ raised bed small space vegetable garden.  Pick only one of the two, because you want at least 2 plants so that you have enough flowers for the veggies to produce well.

You can choose to grow your cucumbers or squash sprawling or up a cage.  There are different kinds of each.

Cucumbers: For sprawling over the side, I like Salad Bush Hybrid. (You can also train this up a cage if you like). But if I am going the cage route, I prefer Sweet Success.

Summer Squash: These I just grow up a cage! My top picks are Park’s Straightneck for yellow squash and Spineless Beauty for zucchini.

Note: You can let any of these sprawl if you like; make a hill on one of the 4′ ends of the raised bed and you can have three plants, spilling over the sides.

Final Notes on Vegetable Seeds

If you don’t like something on these lists, you can choose other veggies.  In particular, pole beans make great additions to your small space garden because you can train them up a trellis or tower!

If you’re longing for some sweet peppers instead, try the sweet pepper Carmen. Not a bell, but it’s space saving and delicious served all kinds of ways.

Vegetable seeds for small gardens aren’t hard to grow, but the smaller your garden, the more carefully you need to choose your varieties.

Enjoy your harvest!

A raised bed vegetable garden is a good option for vegetable gardening in cooler climate zones, or any zone where you have a thin or rocky soil type.   The soil in raised beds warms up quicker, as well as provides more depth for rocky garden soil.

Raised beds are also good if your soil drains poorly.  Even an extra 6 or more inches of drainage in a raised bed can be the difference of your vegetables’ roots breathing or drowning.

Raised Bed Benefits

Do you want to grow bigger, healthier vegetables?  Would you like to be able to utilize better the space for the land you have (especially if you are doing small space vegetable gardening)?  If your answer is “Yes!”, then you should consider incorporating a raised bed design into your garden plot.

With a raised bed, the plant roots have extra room to grow and are more likely to produce a good harvest than vegetables grown in a crowded, shallow space.

Making a Raised Bed

To construct a raised bed vegetable garden you need the following:

• A raised frame (wood, rock or brick) to hold in the extra soil.
• Extra soil, which needs to be nice and loamy (check out the types of soil post for more information on loamy soil).

The width of the raised bed depends on how large you desire the garden to be.  A common height is between 12 to 21 inches, but it can be more or less (but no less than 6 inches).  For instance, some people like it knee height, others like it almost hip height, so they don’t have to bend over as much.

You can use regular garden dirt that has been mixed with amendments such as compost, peat moss, and manure for your raised bed soil.  If you have the money to do so, you can buy a combination of top soil and compost and fill the entire bed with it.  Unless you have a very small raised bed, though, that might get expensive.

FYI, your raised bed soil preparation involves raking the soil level.  This prevents low spots or places where the water can pool around the plant and thus hold excessive moisture. If after you water the first time you see depressed areas, you know you need to rake or even add more soil to those areas.

If you’re interested in making a raised bed, here are some raised bed kits you might find interesting.

Alternative Ideas for a Raised Bed Vegetable Garden

What are some other possible ideas for raised beds?  Glad you asked!

Here’s one — you can try using old tires as containers.  The morning sun heats the rubber, giving your plants warmth all day and night long; especially nice in cooler climates.  Similar to a raised bed vegetable garden, the tires will also shed water more quickly, preventing your plants from sitting in water all day.  Naturally, tires for a large truck will give you more raised space than tires for a sub-compact. 

Another idea is using an EarthBox, which is basically a huge container that also will water your vegetables automatically.  While I’ve never tried one, I have some friends who have and they swear by them.

Any way you create them, raised beds make good gardening sense.  Although it’s a little bit of work to set up at first, you’ll reap the benefits come harvest time!