Preparing and Planning Your Intensive Garden Plot
Measure your space and put a stake in each corner. Run your nylon string from stake to stake. Now you have the area that will need to be prepared inside of the strings.
When you are using a shovel to turn the soil, start on one side and push the shovel in the ground about 1'. Lift the soil and turn it over in the same spot and break it up with the shovel. Continue this until all of the soil is turned over inside the staked area. When the area has grass and you are starting your project in the summer or fall, this process will need to be repeated after a few weeks, or again in the spring to finish breaking down the sod.
When you are starting your project in the spring, turn the sod over, chop or slice the soil off of the back with your shovel, and move the remaining sod to a pile or spread it out somewhere upside down so it can dry out. You should do this even if you intend to use a tiller. When you are starting your project in the summer or fall and will be using a tiller you can till the sod under. First till one direction north to south. Then till the other direction east to west.
Continue tilling again each week for as long as you can work the soil, then till again in early spring. Overlap your tilled rows. Till two rows side by side, then till back down the center of the two rows to be sure that the soil is tilled well. Continue tilling weekly until your beds are planted to prevent weed seeds from germinating. If the weeds get a jump-start on your crops it will cause you problems. This will save you labor spent weeding later in the season.
When you are working with a small space and growing the crops intensively. Some vegetables will utilize the space better than others. Potatoes and corn for instance. In row cropping they are spaced 3' apart. In a 4' bed you can put three rows of potatoes or corn, which will give you three rows in 6' of space counting the walkway. In conventional rows it would take 9' of space for three rows.
You will want to plant them as soon as possible after the frost-free date. There may not be enough time before they are planted to use the space for an early crop unless you plant a fast crop like spinach, turnips or radishes. Vegetables usually grow slower in the cool months of spring and will take a little longer to mature. When your seed packet tells you 45 days to maturity it may actually take 60 days.
In this case you would be planting the potatoes or corn a few weeks after the frost-free date providing that you planted the early crops soon enough. Depending on when your frost-free date is you might not have enough time left for the potatoes or corn to mature. In my location I can do that. I do not because I can plant enough of the fast-growing crops in bed combinations that will have peppers, tomatoes and squash planted later. Depending on how much space you have, you may want to leave out some plant types, so that your beds can be more productive.
Potato plants grow fast and take over the entire bed quickly, this makes it difficult to plant any seeds in the same bed that could grow to maturity before the potato vines will choke them out, except spinach, radishes or turnips. Then you could harvest eight more rows from that bed.
Corn can be combined with beans. This combination will get you an additional six rows of green beans in that 4' bed. Bush beans work the best. You will have to harvest them from under the corn and some rows in the center will be difficult to harvest. This combination works well for dried beans by harvesting the beans after the corn stocks die. You can get more green beans for food storage that way if you can't devote enough space elsewhere.
Pole beans work with corn also but they tie everything together and make it difficult to get to the center of the bed. Pole beans and tall peas are best planted on a fence line in a 2' bed. Some types of winter squashes or pumpkins planted in the center row of a corn bed will work well. Pumpkins do well for me but some winter squashes need a longer growing season and will only work well with corn in a hotter climate.
In desert areas cantaloupe and watermelon can be mixed with corn. As the vines start to encroach on the walkways they can be trained back into the beds. The corn stocks will die and you will have beans or pumpkins etc. growing in that space for the rest of the season.
The best use of the bed space will be combination planting of early, mid, and long-season plants. The plants will need to be categorized into groups, according to how far they need to be spaced apart, how long they will take to mature, and how tall they will grow.
