Basics of Garden Prep and Crop Planning: Pt. 1 - A Real World Exercise - Small Spring Garden in Zone 7B

Stephen J. Douglass on Feb 23 16:59:49

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Basics of Garden Prep and Crop Planning: A Real World Exercise - Small Spring Garden in Zone 7B

Layout & The Magic of the 30" Bed

The 30" Bed "System"

When laying out a rectangular garden, it is best to standardize sizes. The 30" bed system has become ubiquitious because of it's manageable width for planting and harvesting, and, there is a plethora of seeding, seedout, and yield data specifically for and from the 30" bed "system." I put quotes around the word "system" because it's not really referred to as a system. For example, when growing commercially, I prefer to use a 40" bed that's a minimum of 100' long because of tractor width and irrigation considerations. For our kitchen garden at the farmhouse, we use the 30" bed. The point here is standardization. It makes everything much easier down the road. The featured image above is a perfect example of what it looks like. The beds pictured below are 100' long, but they can be almost any length. In our example garden, our beds are 30 feet which is a perfeclty manageable length and can be subdivided in lengths of 10' for crop successions.

When doing the layout for our Zone 7B garden example, I'm going to recommend we widen the layout to 198" or 16 1/2 feet to accommodate 5 beds and 4 "middles" which is just what we rednecks call the footpath between beds. This allows 12" for the footpath.

$(30\times 5)+(12\times 4)=198$

When we use the term "rows," we are talking about a linear subdivision of the bed. Note in the picture above that the bed on the far left, Coastal Star (romaine) , is planted 2 rows per bed, whereas the smaller mixed Salanova has 4 rows per bed. One anomalous thing to note about this picture; we used a very large-wheeled tractor to bed up these beds and this is why the "middles"/footpaths were so wide.

Building up beds is work, but likely necessary for our Zone B7 gardener because I'm betting that the soil is pretty heavy and probably has clay. Clay soil is nutritious but it doesn't drain well and this is why it is highly advantageous to build up your plant beds. This counts for landscaping beds, too. If dealing with sandy-loamy soils, one may just need to till, lay out the beds, and then just let the walkways become the "middles." Keep in mind that the beds can be permanent, so once it's done, it's good to go. An amazing example of an intensive vegetable grower who has spotless permanent 30" beds is Conor Crickmore of Neversink Farm . The pic below is in one of his greenhouses, but the outdoor beds look just like that. He is a master of standardization.

In Part 2 of our Zone 7B Garden series, we will go over our gardener's preferred crops for this Spring.