The boffins at Quickcrop have been working night and day on this problem and have come up with an alternative square foot garden system with spacings we are a lot more comfortable with. Slackening your plant spacings will make you garden easier to manage and wont require as much effort to water You need open areas between crops to let light through to lower growing crops.Ī very intensive garden required a very rich soil but also needs a lot of water to ensure healthy growth. This needs to be taken into account when planning your garden (put taller crops facing South and reduce height as you move North) but will also be a factor with planting distances. Ventilation is also important in keeping disease at bay so very tightly planted crops will suffer more in this regard.Ī tightly packed garden plan looks great on paper but when you actually have to work on the beds it can be a different story! You will need to perform various weeding, feeding and harvesting tasks throughout the season and giving you and your plants some extra elbow room means you are less likely to damage foliage and fruit.Īll plants need light to grow and this is especially true of vegetables as they need to achieve quite rapid growth in a short space of time. Vegetables which are planted too close together will be stunted as they aren't receiving enough food which makes them more susceptible to attack from pests and disease. There is no big mystery here, the more food a plant gets, the bigger it grows. Here are a few reasons why wider spacings are better for your garden: For this reason we have created our own New Square Foot Garden Plans with more room for the plants to grow. Yes, you can grow some acceptable crops at the recommended spacing but if you have seen really healthy and vigourous fruit and vegetables I think you will be a little disappointed. The original SFG is an excellent concept but we do feel many of the planting distances are too tight to grow really impressive vegetables. The idea is each square foot contains a certain amount of each crop depending on the size of the vegetable and how close they can be planted.

This system is especially good for beginners as it makes plant spacing much easier and also makes more sense for growing in a small space as most beginners do.

Square Foot Gardening is an easy to understand method of planting vegetables which splits a gardeners plot into square foot areas rather than into rows.

Square foot garden planner