If you’ve been avoiding growing watermelons because your garden is too small, wait no longer! You can grow a watermelon plant in a small 4′ x 4′ raised garden bed – if you use a trellis.

A single watermelon plant, given good growing conditions, can almost fill a 15-foot-wide circle on the ground. Yikes! There’s no avoiding that they are large, vigorous plants. But if you select the right variety, take good care of them, and train them up a trellis, you can enjoy fresh melons from your own small garden beds.

1) Make sure these plants get full sunlight – 8 hours or more.

Watermelons thrive in full sunlight.  However, a couple of years ago, I took a chance and planted a watermelon in a 50-square-foot bed (about 3′ x 16′) with two young 2-year-old espalier apple trees. It only received about 6 hours of sunlight, but I still harvested 3 large watermelons from that bed. So, sometimes you can succeed, even if you “break” the rules! Just don’t count on a good harvest with less than full sunlight of 8 hours or more.

This is a watermelon plant growing in a 50 square foot raised bed with two young espalier apple trees.

2) Give them the best soil, as deep as possible, in your raised bed.

Their root systems are massive. Just because they will be growing vertically up a trellis doesn’t mean that their roots will remain in a small area at the base of the trellis. These roots will go down as deep as they can, and sidewise for a long distance. I’ve found the roots growing several feet outside the small garden bed they were planted in.

This is one reason that I don’t put weed barrier under my raised garden beds. I want my plants to grow as large and vigorously as possible, to produce a big crop. Any time you restrict their root growth, the plant will become stunted and not produce as much.

Also, once their vines start taking off (maybe 3-4 feet long), I no longer grow other plants in the same bed with them. I give my watermelon plants the whole bed to themselves. But I still usually grow a spring crop before the watermelons, and a fall crop after them.

We built new garden beds last year, to make it easier for me to garden with my disability. These beds are made from concrete (cinder) blocks, and are 18 inches high, a little over 3 feet wide, and almost 16 feet long – for a total of 50 square feet each. These beds have the deepest soil I’ve ever used in my raised bed gardens, and I was frankly stunned at how large our harvests were last year.

Deep soil can have a huge difference on how well your plants grow. We planted 2 butternut squash plants and 3 watermelon plants in one of those beds. We used 4 trellises – two at each end – and grew the third watermelon plant on the soil in the middle.

We ended up harvesting 40 pounds of squash and 105 pounds of watermelon in just 50 square feet! Our friends and neighbors really loved us last year, as there was no way my sister and I could eat all that watermelon by ourselves.

This 16 foot long raised bed has two watermelon trellises at the left end, two squash trellises at the right end, and a large watermelon plant growing on the bed in the middle. This one bed produced 105 pounds of watermelon and 40 pounds of squash!

3) Select a variety suited for trellising and your climate

Watermelons love hot weather and often take 90-100 days to mature. They generally don’t thrive in cool, cloudy climates or short growing seasons. However, some varieties have been bred to mature quickly or tolerate cooler weather.

I like to grow “Blacktail Mountain.” It can ripen in just 75 days, and will grow well in both cool and hot weather. It usually produces icebox melons, about 10 pounds, which is a nice size to trellis. I will be planting one  in late May and another in July, in order to extend the harvest.

But this variety really surprised us last year – one of the watermelons hanging on our trellis weighed 17 pounds! That one almost popped out of the sling we made out of nylons. I wouldn’t normally try to trellis melons that large, but we weren’t given a choice!

I used a nylon hose to support this trellised watermelon. Unfortunately, it didn’t know when to stop growing! This melon grew more than 50% larger than normal, and at 17 pounds, started to split open its sling. I wouldn’t normally expect to successfully trellis watermelons that large!

4) Don’t Plant Until the Soil is Warm

Wait until both the weather and the soil is warm before you plant them. Our average last spring frost is around May 15^th, but I’ll often wait until late May for the best growing conditions. You can try babying your plants and starting them sooner under row cover, in a cold frame, or protected in a Wall-of-Water, but they simply don’t thrive in those conditions. After all that effort, you will usually only harvest melons a week or two earlier at most.

However, if you live in an area with an extremely short growing season, it may be the only way to grow watermelon at all. I’ve generally had better luck growing a fast maturing variety instead of trying to start them early before the weather warms up.

I prefer to plant the seeds directly in the garden bed, instead of using transplants. This is because direct-seeded plants tend to grow very large, vigorous root systems with deep taproots. Transplants often fail to develop taproots, and end up needing to be watered more frequently.

5) Build sturdy trellises!

Given deep soil and good growing conditions, I normally expect to harvest 20-30 pounds of watermelon growing on a 4 foot wide and 7 foot tall trellis. That’s a LOT of weight! Make sure your trellis is sturdy enough to hold that.

Our favorite trellis right now is made from a livestock panel cut in half and attached to two t-posts pounded into the soil. That will hold anything! I’ve also made trellises from wood frames and welded wire fencing, and have screwed these to the outside of small wooden garden beds.

I have learned that I can use trellises on both the north and south sides of my raised beds. The mid-summer sun is high in the sky, and will supply full sunlight to both trellises as it travels. Don’t put the trellises on the east and west sides, as they will shade each other as the sun moves across the sky.

6) Train the plants up the trellis

Watermelon plants grow fast – as much as 1-2 feet per week! They will not climb a trellis by themselves, so you need to tie the vines to the trellis as they grow. Don’t count on their tendrils to hold the plants secure – especially during wind storms or when they have heavy fruits hanging from them.

The large main vines dangling in the center need to be tied up. Watermelons will not naturally climb very far up a trellis, so we need to give them some assistance!

You can use any number of things to tie your plants to the trellis. My current favorite is surveyors tape. I like to use a loose figure-8 loop, wrapped just below a leaf joint, to hold the vines up.

I like to tie up the vines at the base of a leaf axil. I use a loose figure-8 to attach them to the trellis. This photo is from a squash plant at the other end of the garden bed.

Watermelon vine are continually sending out new vines at nearly every leaf. I will train 8-10 main vines up my trellis, but I prune off ALL the side shoots they are sending out. Otherwise, the trellis will become very overgrown. Your fruit will obtain all the energy they need from the leaves on the main vines.

These are side shoots, growing out from a leaf axil. I prune them all off, leaving only the main vines to grow up the trellis. If I don’t, the trellis gets quickly overgrown. You can also see a baby watermelon growing in the corner of the cinder blocks.

7) Support your watermelon fruit with slings

Although butternut squash fruit never need to be supported, once the fruit of your watermelons start weighing more than a few pounds, they will fall off the vines and break. (Been there, done that!) You will need to support them by creating a sling attached to the trellis. You can make slings out of many different items. Some people use mesh onion bags, pieces of fabric, or even bird netting.

Last year, I used nylon stockings given to me by a friend. I cut two slings out of each leg, tied the bottoms closed and slit the top part of the nylons into two pieces so I could tie it to the trellis. You need to make sure that the sling will continue to support the watermelon as it grows. You don’t want it to stretch and sag so much that the weight of the melon ends up hanging from the vine instead of the sling.

A few of your early-pollinated melons will grow at the base of the vine, and can be supported by a brick or other object underneath them, if they don’t quite touch the ground.

8) Keep your melon plants well-watered

Vines growing on trellises are exposed to the wind, and lose more moisture than vines growing on the ground. Make sure you water your plants once or twice a week during dry weather. You want the water to soak deep into the soil. I also mulch the soil surface to slow evaporation.

This is the second reason I don’t use weed barrier under my raised beds. I want my plant roots to grow as deep as possible. This will let them reach moisture deep in the soil, and reduce how often I need to water them. If these large vines are growing in shallow 6” deep soil, you might need to water the plants every single day.

9) Harvest the melons when they become ripe, and enjoy!

Each watermelon is attached to the vine, opposite of a leaf. Next to the base of the watermelon stem will be a tendril. When that tendril turns brown and starts drying up, the watermelon will be ripe.

Now, if you only have 6 inches of topsoil in your raised garden beds, don’t worry! You can still grow watermelons on trellises. The plants just won’t grow as big, may produce a smaller harvest, and will probably need watering more often. But they’ll taste just as sweet! I’ve even grown watermelon in 20-gallon Smart Pots, and harvested 5 small watermelons from one pot.

Have fun growing your own watermelons in small garden beds, and enjoy your harvest!

This is a 17-pound watermelon that grew on our trellis last year. It’s miracle it didn’t fall off! I normally wouldn’t try trellising watermelons this big, but it just ended up growing a LOT larger than it should have. Yum!!

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It’s incredibly frustrating for a gardener to get very sick during spring.  There are so many things that need to get done! My sister has had to do most of my share of our spring gardening this year, but we’re still late in planting a number of crops.

I was occasionally able to stroll through our garden to see how things were going. Most of the plants in our mini fruit garden were in full bloom this year, but even during the occasional really nice spring days we had last month, I saw extremely few pollinating bees in my garden – either honey bees or native pollinators. This really freaked me out, as without pollinators, I don’t know if we will harvest much fruit this year, or vegetables like my squashes. I always had tons of native pollinators at my last home.

My parents had given me wooden nesting blocks to encourage the native solitary pollinating bees. I saw a few bees active in my blocks both last year and this spring. They are much more efficient pollinators than honey bees, so I’m hoping the few I saw still managed to pollinate enough of my crops so we can get a good harvest.

You can see one solitary pollinating bee working in this wooden nesting block.

I only saw one or two bees working the blossoms on my 10 espalier or dwarf fruit trees. This is the first year my sweet cherry trees have a full set of blooms, and I’m really worried I won’t get much fruit. If I don’t get much fruit this year, I plan to buy a small very soft brush to hand-pollinate my fruit trees next year. This wouldn’t be too hard to do with my small 6-foot high fruit trees. I also think it’s time for my sister and I to learn how to encourage even more native pollinators in our garden.

I saw a different bee pollinating my blueberries. Unfortunately, I only saw one bee when I would normally see a dozen or more.

This is a native bee pollinating my blueberry blossoms.

We harvested our first spring vegetables last week – purple asparagus and Japanese turnips. They are great together in a stir-fry with some onions. We also have some young lettuce for salads.

These are both delicious spring vegetables. Purple asparagus is about 20% sweeter than green varieties. If you’ve never tried Japanese turnips (these are Hakurei), I urge you to plant a few. I’m not particularly fond of regular turnips, but this variety is wonderful!

We were really late to finish harvesting our winter kale and spinach because I’ve been so sick. They were both bolting when we finally had a chance to cook them down, divide them into portions, and put them in our freezer.  Most of our Red Russian kale leaves were still tender and delicious even though the plants had grown almost 4 feet tall and were blooming!

Even though these kale plants had bolted nearly 4 feet tall, we were able to harvest quite a lot of tender leaves to put in our freezer. If we weren’t in a rush to clear the bed for spring planting, I would let the blossoms remain to support beneficial insects in our garden.

Thank goodness there are some crops that don’t need any attention in the spring!  My garlic was planted and mulched in the fall, and is growing beautifully this spring – with no help needed from me at all.

This end of the bed has garlic plants nearly one foot high. We just planted our onion plants at the other end – nearly 2 weeks later than normal, unfortunately. I think we’ll still get a decent crop, though perhaps not as large as usual.

So, even if life hands you a left turn, you just do the best that you can in your garden. I won’t have as many spring crops as I usually would, and others are getting a late start – but we’re still eating some fresh food in early May, and we have hopes for a full summer garden.

Enjoy spring!

We had a fairly mild winter this year (low of only 11 F, instead of a normal low of 0 to -10 F). I somehow expected spring to arrive early, but it has dragged its heels instead. March has been much cooler than normal for us. We will only have highs in the mid-30′s for this last week of March, and our ground is covered in snow.

Our mail-order of bare root strawberry plants arrived the first week of March – long before our normal planting time. Several of my friends received their bare root fruit trees just before this cold snap arrived, and they weren’t able to promptly plant the trees. How do we store these plants in good condition until the weather warms up again?

Open the package, and make sure the plant roots are still moist. You can store the plants in the original container for a few days if they are kept cool (30′s – 40′s F) and the roots are moist – perhaps in an unheated garage or basement. If the roots aren’t surrounded by moist packing material, you can create some by tearing some newspaper into narrow strips, soaking the strips in water, and then thoroughly wringing it out before wrapping them gently around your plant roots before placing everything back into the plastic bag they arrived in. Don’t let the roots freeze! If you don’t have this ideal storage place, ask if one of your friends or neighbors do.

If you need to store your plants for more than a few days, it’s best to heel them into the ground – if you can find a spot where the soil is thawed enough to dig. Just make a hole large enough to hold the roots, place the plants at an angle to the ground (they don’t need to be vertical for this), and gently cover the roots with a mound of damp soil. If you expect a real cold spell (in the teens or lower), you might want add some mulch on top of the surface, to keep the freezing cold from penetrating the soil too far.

It’s important to remember that this is temporary. You absolutely need to move and plant your trees in their permanent positions before their buds start opening or their roots start growing.

Strawberry plants are small enough to be put into your refrigerator for a couple of weeks. There’s a risk of the roots drying out there. So, about twice a week, wrap a damp piece of newspaper or damp paper towel around each bundle of roots to keep them moist. But you don’t want to soak the roots in water, as they can start to rot if they get too wet in storage. You can keep them in a plastic bag to hold in the moisture, but make sure you open it occasionally to let fresh air in.

If you don’t have a storage place that’s both cool enough but still above freezing, AND the ground is too frozen to dig, you’ll have to figure out a compromise. You might be able to buy a couple of bags of mulch, and bring them into your house to thaw overnight. Find a sheltered spot outdoors (perhaps up against the south side of your house), lay your bare root trees on top of the ground, and then cover the roots with a generous pile of mulch. Make sure the mulch is moist! Again, this is temporary. As soon as the soil thaws out again, plant your trees into their permanent positions.

It shouldn’t hurt the tree to have its branches exposed to the weather, but the roots really need good protection. If the tree branches might be chewed on by your local rabbits while it’s waiting to get planted, you can wrap the tree in a couple of layers of row cover to protect it.

Some folks decide to put their tree into a container to store it until planting time. If you keep the planted container outdoors, surround the container with a deep layer of mulch to keep the roots from freezing. If at all possible, transfer this potted tree into the ground before its buds start to open.

If your tree leafs out while it is still in the container, it’s a good idea to keep the tree in the container for several more months before planting. If you remove the tree from the container before its growing root system has filled the container enough to hold onto most of the soil, the soil will fall off the roots during the planting process and the tree will be severely stressed, if it doesn’t actually die.

If only the mail-order nurseries wouldn’t ship their plants so early! Some companies will let you choose when you want to receive your plants. If I had a choice (we didn’t with our strawberry plants), I would have requested about mid-April for our area in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. Our soil is rarely frozen too hard to plant by that point in spring.

Hang in there, folks! Spring is bound to arrive sooner or later.

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These green onions are about 1 foot high. If you look closely, you’ll notice that some of the leaves are cut off near the top, or have round holes cut into them. You can see the damage more clearly in the photo at the top of this page.

I suspected that cutworms caused this damage, although I don’t usually see this kind of damage so high above the soil or on plants this large. Cutworms do their dirty work at night. They hide under plant debris or in the soil during the day. They usually cut down young seedlings in your spring garden. Some people blame all of this type of damage on rabbits, when some may be caused by cutworms instead

I gently dug around in the soil of this Smart Pot container, looking for this pest. I didn’t find any. But I found new damage every morning. So I finally checked one night after midnight. I used a flashlight to look over my onion plants very carefully. At first, I didn’t see them. I finally spotted two of them – one large and one small. If they are disturbed or have bright light shined on them, they will drop to the ground and curl up into a ball.

These small pests can do a lot of damage in your garden – even in containers!

Cutworms are not “worms” or even grubs, though they may look like them. They are caterpillars of certain moths. Many varieties are found around the world. Apparently, these cutworms in my hoop house are one of the climbing varieties. Most cutworms just chew or cut through the stems of young seedlings at ground level – often tomatoes, peppers, beans, cabbage family plants, and more.

Cutworms are a common problem for many gardeners, but I have to say that I never ran into so many of them until I moved to my current home. Instead of just being an early spring pest, I now have to deal with them both spring and fall, and in larger numbers than I’m used to. What has really surprised me is how often they get into my garden containers – even my waist-high containers! I had never come across the climbing variety before.

Most gardeners can prevent cutworm damage by putting “collars” around their young plants, usually made from cardboard tubes or metal cans. You need to push the bottom end an inch or two into the soil, with the top end of the collar a few inches high above the soil. I also used to prevent most cutworm damage by just tucking three toothpicks up tight around each stem. This prevented the cutworm from chewing all the way around.

But, neither of these methods work with my climbing type of cutworm. I will continue to look for cutworms in the surface of the soil within a foot of freshly damaged plants, but this year my sister & I will also be using our bantam chickens to help with pest control. Before we plant the garden, we’ll put them in a small chicken tractor on our raised beds for a few days, so they can scratch up the soil and look for grubs, cutworms, and other insects.

Despite this pest, I still had an awesome garden last year. I’ll make sure to always grow a few extra transplants for possible replacements, if the first seedlings I plant are mowed down. Unfortunately, cutworms can also migrate into my garden from the neighboring lawn area. We’re still working on attracting more beneficial insects to our new gardens – those that will attack our pests. If necessary, after we plant the garden, I’ll do a few night patrols with a flashlight to collect the culprits – and turn them into free chicken food!

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You can see the leaves of the carrots coming up through the mulch. The container they are growing in is only 8 inches deep, but as you can see, these carrots still grew 6-7 inches long.

The outdoor carrots and beets are also sprouting. We stored these roots under mulch, inside the cold frame where they had grown last fall. The beets have sprouted quite a lot of leaves! We’ll need to harvest the rest of these very soon, and put them in our refrigerator. I will replant a few of our extra carrot roots in the beds with our fruit trees. When the carrots start blooming this summer, their blossoms will attract a lot of beneficial insects to my garden.

This is an heirloom variety of beet, bred to store well over winter. It remains tender even when it reaches fairly large sizes. It is called Winter Keeper or Lutz Green Leaf. It’s not commonly available. I purchased my seed from Territorial Seed Company.

We have three one-year-old Swiss chard plants in one large Smart Pot® in our unheated hoop house. Our hoop house never dropped below 23 F this winter, so our chard never went dormant. It will also be sending up flowering stalks in a few weeks, but we will be pulling them up soon, to replant the pots with new crops.

These large Swiss chard leaves are mostly used for cooked greens or for juicing.

In our outdoor beds, we still have vibrant crops of spinach and Red Russian kale. We will finish harvesting them in late March or early April, in time to plant our early spring crops in those beds. I don’t plan to grow winter spinach in my hoop house again, as it doesn’t get cold enough inside to grow really sweet spinach.

We planted a bit too much spinach this winter, so the plants in this cold frame have barely been touched when we harvested this winter. A helpful neighbor will receive this bounty.

Our last three tatsoi plants have already bolted nearly a foot high, and we will finish eating their greens this week. The garlic that we planted last November is now 2-3 inches high. We will harvest them in July.

This variety is German Extra-hardy hardneck garlic. It stores extremely well just sitting in a cool, dry room. We are still eating fresh garlic bulbs that we harvested last July.

Last week, I planted the seed for our good storage onions in our hoop house. They will be ready to transplant into our garden beds by late April. I prefer to grow my onions from seed, as their mature bulbs seem to store better than onions grown from sets.

This week, I will be also be planting seeds in my hoop house to produce transplants for my early crops, such as miniature cabbage, broccoli, and romaine lettuce. You could easily start seeds for your early spring crops inside a cold frame instead.

The only vegetable seeds I start inside my house are tomatoes. I don’t grow pepper plants or eggplant, but I would start them inside, too, if I did. I grow my own sweet potato slips, which I start indoors. I then plant the sprouting sweet potato tubers into trays in my hoop house by mid-May. I pull the slips off the tubers by June 1st to plant in my garden. I plant the seeds of all of my other warm-season summer crops directly into my garden beds.

The main reason I direct seed so many summer crops is because direct-seeded plants can develop deep taproots that are better able to tolerate dry weather. Transplants often develop smaller, shallow root systems that need more irrigation. I’m not too worried about that issue with my cool-season crops, though, as they usually need less irrigation during spring and fall. And tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant usually need to be started early indoors if you want to harvest a large crop from them.

Late April is when I have the least amount of fresh food available from my garden. There are a few greens ready to pick, but not much else. I’ll have some root crops stored in my refrigerator. I usually have just a few vegetables remaining in my cool storage room, such as sweet potatoes, winter squash, onions, etc. I will have to put my remaining garlic into the fridge, too, as it will be starting to sprout by then. It will last for many more weeks or months in there. I sometimes put my last few onions in there, too.

I normally plant corn salad in the fall, to harvest all winter. But I this year I decided to also use them as a very early spring crop.

Meanwhile, my first greens of the season are growing now inside my hoop house – corn salad and miner’s lettuce. I planted them in February. Both are delicious salad greens. They have grown very slowly this month, but I expect them to take off very soon.

Happy gardening, folks!

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I often use grids for planting, though I rarely leave them in place all year. One reason is that I grow large amounts of vegetables year-round (I eat about 8 servings a day), and the grids get in the way when I use slightly larger tools (such as a small spading fork) to mix in fertilizer or harvest my crops. With my damaged hands, I can’t use small hands tools very much.

The second reason is that I often use different spacing for my plants than Mel recommends. I usually increase the distance between my plants by 50% or more, so my spacings don’t always work well with his standard grid of one foot squares. Why don’t I follow Mel’s spacing recommendations?

Five Reason Why I Give My Plants More Elbow Room:

1) Given more space, my plants usually grow more vigorously and produce larger crops.

If I cram plants together, they sometimes become stunted and don’t produce as well. I have never been able to grow a high-quality broccoli plant if I plant them just 12 inches apart. If you give a standard broccoli plant the best growing conditions, it will usually grow more than 2 feet wide and tall. It can then produce a large head, and many edible side shoots. I usually plant them at least 18 inches apart, and sometimes up to 24 inches.

With the right variety and good growing conditions – including giving the plants enough room to grow – you can produce these huge beautiful heads of broccoli in your raised garden beds or large containers.

Most cabbage plants also need much more than 1 square foot. My standard cabbages often grow 2-3 feet wide!  I highly recommend miniature cabbages for small gardens. You can plant them 12-18 inches apart, and harvest tender and juicy 1-2 pound heads. But I was disappointed with the miniature broccoli. They produced very little worth harvesting.

Miniature varieties of cabbages fit perfectly in square foot gardens.

However, other plants grow just fine planted very closely together. I can usually grow carrots, radishes, green onions, or small Japanese turnips very successfully when they are just 3 inches apart. But my beets grow so vigorously that I need to plant them about 6 inches apart, instead of the recommended 4 inches.

Part of the reason is because I built my gardens to provide at least 10-12 inches of topsoil for the plants to grow in. I’ve noticed that beets and some other plants become partly stunted when grown in shallow soil, such as 8” deep containers. My carrots often thrive in 6-8” deep soil, but not my beets.

2) Some plants will produce larger bulbs, tubers, or fruit if they are given more room to grow, even if they produce the same amount per area.

If I have a choice between peeling 1 large potato or 3 small ones, I’ll chose the large one every time. I’ve planted potatoes as close as 12 inches apart – 16 plants in a standard 4′ x 4′ square foot garden bed. I harvested about 30 pounds, but the potatoes were all pretty small.

The size of the tubers will vary depending on the variety grown, but it is also affected by how closely you plant them. I’ve seen recommendations to plant potatoes every 6 inches in square foot gardens! Yikes! That gives each plant very little room to grow.

When I experimented and planted only 9 potato plants per bed, 16 inches apart, the tubers were much larger – and I harvested the same total weight of potatoes per bed, about 30 pounds. So I’m choosing to give my potato plants a LOT more elbow room than is generally recommended for square foot or intensive raised bed gardens.

These potatoes were grown in large, 20-gallon Smart Pots. The left pot had 3 Yukon Gold potato plants, and the right pot only had 2 plants. Both pots produced 5 pounds of potatoes, but notice the big difference in sizes! The previous year, I experimented with 5 potato plants in one pot, as is often recommended. I still harvested about 5 pounds of potatoes, but they were so small, I was too embarrassed to take a photo of them!

3) With more space between the plants, you can more easily work among or harvest from your plants with less chance of damaging them.

When I planted my bush beans 4 inches apart, I found it challenging to harvest the beans without damaging the plants in the process – the plants were tangled together, and it was hard to spot all the bean pods. Given 6 inches between the plants, I was able to work among them with less risk of breaking or tearing off stems or leaves – and I still had a large harvest.

I have had the same problem when I put mulch between my plants during the summer. If plants are too close together, I sometimes damaged them in my effort to tuck mulch between them.

4) Giving your plants extra space will help to prevent the larger plants from shading the nearby small plants.

Your garden plants don’t know that they are “supposed” to keep their leaves within their allotted area – their leaves often spread well beyond the square you planted them in. You can seriously stunt your small plants by putting them too close to your larger ones.

I don’t have problems when I grow a large patch of the same crop. All of the plants germinate at the same time, and grow at the same speed. If you space them properly, you will get a big, beautiful harvest.

And it’s OK to plant small, fast-growing plants in between large, slow-growing ones – such as lettuce or spinach plants tucked in between broccoli or tomatoes. You’ll harvest the lettuce or spinach before the larger plants start shading them too much.

But if I put a broccoli plant in one square foot, and plant carrots in the square right next to it, I probably won’t harvest many carrots. The broccoli will end up seriously shading the nearby squares long before the slower-growing carrots are ready to harvest.

I ran into a similar problem in my waist-high growing containers. I planted small rows of seeds for carrots, Japanese turnips, and miniature cabbages. If each of these had grown at the same speed, they would have been fine, as they all had a similar mature height.

But the Japanese turnips grew faster than the carrots and mini cabbages. The turnip leaves grew tall and wide very quickly, and shaded their neighbors so heavily, that I lost the other two crops as a result. These turnips are not large plants – they just grow a lot faster than nearly everything else in my garden. So I need to plant these turnips farther away than I normally would from any other crop, and I will also try to keep them on the north side of smaller plants.

I planted the Japanese turnip seed on the left side at the same time as the miniature cabbage seed on the right. If all the plants had grown at the same speed, they would have all produced great crops. But the turnips grew extremely fast, and shaded my miniature cabbages so badly that I lost the crop.

I would also be careful about replanting very small areas in your raised beds. It is commonly recommended that you can plant and harvest as small as 1 square foot at a time. Unless you are mostly growing very small salad crops, I encourage you to replant a larger area than that.

Most vegetables grow to one foot tall or higher. If you harvest a crop in one square foot, and that empty square is surrounded by larger plants, the seeds you plant there may not receive enough sunshine to grow well. It’s like being in a small alley, surrounded by skyscrapers!

I choose to mostly plant and harvest from areas that are at least 2′ x 2′ in size, so that my young seedlings will receive enough sunlight.

5) When you space your plants farther apart, you don’t have to water your garden as often.

The biggest disadvantage of square foot and raised bed gardens is the need to water the beds more often than row gardens on level ground. One reason is that the soil in raised beds dries out faster. But another reason is that the closer you plant your vegetables, the more water they will need.

So, by spacing my plants slightly farther apart, I don’t have to water my garden as often. I also prefer to give my plants deeper soil to grow in. I found that they usually needed more watering if their roots were limited to a 6-inch deep bed, even if I used “Mel’s Mix” potting soil recipe. That is why I don’t use a weed barrier underneath my square foot garden.

I encourage you to experiment with your own gardens. Plant some of your vegetables very close together – per Mel’s recommendations – and plant another patch of the same vegetable spaced farther apart. Compare their growth, health, ease of care, and quality and amount of what they produce. You may find your own results to be different from mine, depending upon which plant variety you grow and your own garden’s unique growing conditions.

I am always experimenting to find better ways to grow my plants. Happy gardening!

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I have a confession to make – I am a seedaholic. I struggle against the compulsion to collect seeds for every type of plant that I would love to grow. It doesn’t matter that I only have a small garden to work with. I want to grow everything!

At one point, I had three one-gallon glass jars in my refrigerator, chock-full of seeds waiting for their turn in my garden. I finally had to break down and give up my dream of growing everything – and many of those seeds ended up finding adoptive homes with my Master Gardener friends.

I still struggle every year with my seed addiction. But I have learned to focus on the main crops that I regularly eat, and the varieties that will work best in my raised garden beds. There are thousands of varieties to choose from. How do you decide which ones to grow?

Here are a few ideas on how to choose which seeds to buy:

1. Buy what you eat! It’s OK to try out a new vegetable, in small quantities, but don’t plant something just because everyone else does. I don’t know how many times I planted green beans, and even spent time and energy canning them. But I rarely actually eat them, so – for me – they are not worth growing.
2. Make sure the crop will thrive in your local climate. My previous property here in Virginia was located in a severe frost pocket. I was lucky to have a 100-day frost-free growing season, and my summer nights often dropped into the 40′s. Crops that needed more than 100 days of hot weather didn’t produce well, if at all.
3. Select varieties that are resistant to your common pests and diseases. Squash vine borers are common around here, and can devastate our plants. I choose to grow butternut squash, which I happen to love, and it isn’t affected by borers.
4. Choose varieties with great flavor (what you consider great). Most home-grown food tastes better than store-bought, but each variety is different. I didn’t really enjoy turnips until I tried a small Japanese variety called Hakurei. Now I love them! You can sometimes pick up several varieties of a vegetable at a farmer’s market to compare flavors.
5. Select a few dwarf varieties to better fit your small raised beds. I love my miniature cabbages (very tender, great flavor, and mature quickly) – though I still grow a few large storage cabbages in the fall. However, the miniature broccoli had such tiny heads, they really weren’t worth growing. I now make room for full-size broccoli, even though each plant needs at least a 2′x2′ area.
6. If your garden only gets 4-5 hours of direct sunlight, grow greens and root crops. Most fruiting plants (tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc) need at least 6-8 hours of sun to thrive.
7. If your garden space is very limited, and you want to produce the most food possible, stick mostly to root crops, greens, and trellised plants. Crops like broccoli and corn take up a lot of space for a relatively small harvest.
8. Choose varieties best suited for what you plan to do with the harvest – fresh eating, canning, long-term storage, etc. If you want to dry tomatoes, you will have better success using a variety that has been bred for that. I love to store some crops all winter long, so I select varieties that have been bred to be good keepers.
9. If you will only be able to visit your garden once or twice a week, choose crops that don’t need to be harvested regularly (and set up an automatic irrigation system). Avoid vegetables like peas, beans, and summer squash, that need to be picked every 2-3 days.
10. Sometimes, choosing faster-maturing varieties will allow you to grow more crops in a bed per year. Succession planting involves growing 2 or more crops, one after another, in the same bed in one year. Choosing plant varieties that mature two or three weeks earlier than normal will occasionally allow you to double- or even triple-crop when you otherwise couldn’t.

Unfortunately, it can sometimes be hard to decide from the catalog descriptions which varieties will be best suited for your needs. And, remember, seed companies and nurseries are in the business of selling their products. They often describe the benefits of each variety, but may skip over any possible disadvantages.

If a particular vegetable or fruit is a major crop for me, I will do an internet search to read descriptions for each variety from several different companies, and other gardener’s evaluations of their own experience with it. My sister often checks websites such as GardenWeb or Dave’s Garden.

Keep in mind that a variety may fail in one climate (such as the Pacific northwest), but thrive here in the mid-Atlantic. It’s also a great idea to ask your neighbors or your local Master Gardeners or Cooperative Extension office which varieties work well in your area.

Ultimately, we have to test varieties in our own gardens, usually over several years. I often grow 2 or 3 varieties side-by-side in my garden. I’ll compare how well they grow, how long they take to mature, how well they deal with local pests or diseases, how they taste, and how well they store or overwinter. This might take a few years, because one variety might thrive in an unusually hot, dry, wet, or cold season, but be mediocre during an average year.

It’s actually probably best to always grow more than one variety of each crop – as extra security for unusual weather, pest, or disease issues. However, that is not very practical for the larger crops if you are really limited in space. And I sometimes decide that I love one particular variety, and simply don’t want to try growing anything else.

For my main crops, I usually make a point of purchasing the seed from companies that use large trial grounds to test seeds, or who also sell to small farmers. Farmers can easily recognize good quality seed, and don’t want to risk losing money using poor seed. Home gardeners, however, often blame poor germination or growth on their own inexperience, the weather, the soil, or some “invisible” bug.

There are too many companies that sell poor quality seed or mislabeled seed to the home gardening market. So I usually end up buying most of the seed for the main crops that I depend upon from companies such as Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Territorial Seed Company. Both of these have extensive trial grounds to test seed quality. But I also experiment with seed from other sources, including Seed Savers Exchange – a nonprofit that specializes in preserving hundreds of heirloom and open-pollinated varieties.

My personal goal is to produce about 70-80% of the fresh fruits and vegetables that my sister and I eat, nearly year-round, and we eat a lot of vegetables. We are pretty close to accomplishing that goal for our vegetables, but we have a few more years to go before our mini fruit garden fully matures.

A major crop failure can cost us a lot to replace at the store. We harvested 40 pounds of butternut squash last fall, and we ate all of it by mid-winter. We’ll need to grow double that amount this year. Eighty pounds of organic winter squash would cost about $120 at the farmer’s market.

Your situation may be different from mine. You may just be interested in growing a little fresh food to add to your diet. Using small square foot garden beds is one of the easiest ways to do that. So, if a particular crop doesn’t produce well, it won’t make a big difference to your budget. You can afford to experiment more.

One last suggestion: The price of seed has increased a LOT over the last few years. It can easily cost $2-4 for each small packet. It’s a major investment if you grow many crops or varieties, like we do. Ask your friends, family, and neighbors if they would like to chip in on a bulk order. It’s cheaper per person to buy seed by the ounce and divide it up among several families.

Or, if you plan to grow a particular variety for several years, you can buy a few year’s worth and store it in your fridge. That’s what I do. That’s another advantage of buying seed from companies that sell to small farmers. They also provide seed in larger quantities, not just in expensive packets.

Happy gardening, and may your dreams come true!

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This early February harvest is the last of the florets (side shoots) from our broccoli plants in our hoop house.

However, don’t think that you need to have a hoop house in order to grow winter vegetables. It expands the harvest season for many crops, but you can still have a very productive winter garden using simple cold frames and row cover. The harvest season for our outdoor broccoli plants lasted from October through November, protected under row cover. The broccoli harvest usually ends once the outdoor temperatures start dropping into the teens.

A couple of years ago, we added a 12 foot by 24 foot hoop house to our garden, to help accommodate my disability. If you build it yourself, it can cost under $1,000, and you can grow quite a few crops inside it.

This is our 12 foot by 24 foot hoop house. The sloped ground in front of the entrance became very slippery this winter, so we just set a few pallets to serve as a safe staircase. We remove the plastic at both ends of the hoop house during the summer, so it doesn’t overheat.

I would have preferred to grow my hoop house crops in slightly raised beds at ground level. When you cover low-growing winter crops in your hoop house with a light row cover, the warmth from the ground helps to moderate their temperature. The crops rarely drop below the mid-teens, even if it goes below 0 degrees outside.

However, due to my disability, I can’t work for long at ground level, so we chose to grow our hoop house crops in tall or raised containers instead. I’ve been really satisfied with how well my plants have grown in my large Smart Pots®. These heavy fabric pots drain well and don’t get as hot in the summer sun like plastic pots do.

These are the large heads of broccoli grown in Smart Pots in our hoop house. We harvested them in late October. These plants continued to produce edible side shoots through early February.

But what I love best about these containers is that plant roots are “air pruned” when they reach the side of the pots, and the plants develop a very healthy, branched root system instead of circling the inside of the container.

We have grown a variety of crops in large Smart Pots in our hoop house – squash, watermelon, tomatoes, broccoli, beets, Swiss chard, kale, potatoes, and more. We planted our fall broccoli in early August. These young plants are in the mulched pots to the far left in this photo.

However, all containers are more exposed to the cold air than the soil in the ground is. They freeze more often, and the plants are usually exposed to colder air than low-growing crops planted in the ground in the hoop house.  But our hoop house has stayed warmer than we thought it would. It hasn’t yet dropped below 23 degrees, even when the temperature outside reached 11 degrees with 50 mph wind gusts. This was probably because we used a few dozen concrete blocks to support a row of our raised growing trays, and the concrete is retaining some of the warmth from the sun.

This winter, we set aside a 2 foot by 20 foot section of the hoop house for our new bantam chickens. We will move them to a summer pen in the spring. We plan on using them to help compost vegetation from our flower and vegetable gardens, and waste from our kitchen – and my sister will enjoy their fresh eggs!

Our bantam chickens are enjoying their winter stay in our hoop house!

Growing vegetables in containers is a new experience for me. I’ve only been doing it for three years, and I’m learning a lot as I go. If you want to learn more about Smart Pots®, visit: SmartPots.com  They are available in different sizes and styles, from 1 gallon up to 400 gallons!  One of their sizes is a 100 gallon circular Big Bag Bed – 12 inches deep, and just over 4 feet across. It would be a nice container for a square foot garden (with 13.5 square feet of growing space), but it would be bit more difficult to adapt for using with a cold frame or trellis. My Smart Pots® have held up very well, and I’m really happy with them.

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What do I do in my garden in the middle of winter? Well, it’s still a little early to start pruning my fruit trees. Instead, I focused on my winter vegetables that are growing under my cold frames and row covers.

A couple of times every winter I clean up dead or yellowing leaves among my plants. The older leaves don’t tolerate the winter weather as well as the young leaves, and they tend to gradually die off – especially if they are touching the row cover.

This bed of Red Russian kale could use some cleaning up of its old leaves.

Removing these leaves encourages better ventilation within the cold frames, allows more sunlight to reach the younger leaves, and reduces the spread of disease. As I pick the larger kale leaves, the plants start producing young and tender leaves along the stalks.  And, frankly, cleaning up my beds is a good excuse to spend time among the plants I love, and it makes my winter garden look fresh and gorgeous again!

This spruced-up bed of kale is looking gorgeous again!

I also checked my cold frames and row covers to see if they needed any repairs. I am using a new variety of row cover in my garden this winter, and I checked to see how it was holding up. I was disappointed to discover that it was starting to split apart in the center, where it had been folded at the factory – even though it had been in the garden for only three weeks!

This row cover is splitting where it was folded at the factory.

In addition, I used the same row cover on the lids of my new cold frames. Here, the row cover is actually holding water in a puddle, instead of letting it drain through like it should.

This is the second time I’ve seen this new row cover holding a puddle of water, instead of letting it drain through like it should. The water froze overnight.

I had never seen either of this happen before with any of my earlier row covers.  This sheet was the Pro 34 from AgroFabric. I don’t know if it was just a bad batch, but I’ll be returning this sheet, and switching to a different type.

We have received enough rain this winter to keep the soil moist. If I had clear plastic or glass covers over my cold frames, I would probably need to water my plants a few times during the winter. But it hasn’t yet dropped below 10 degrees this winter, and the row covers on my cold frame lids supported the few inches of snow that we have received, so I haven’t yet needed to use any solid covers this winter.

I peeked under the mulch covering my empty beds to see how the soil looked.  This is new soil, purchased only a few months ago, and I am still working on improving it. The surface of the soil under the mulch shows evidence of earthworm activity from late last fall, when the weather stayed warmer than normal for several weeks.  The soil is forming what is called good structure – it is becoming soft, crumbly, and granulated. I even saw tiny insects crawling around, enjoying the warmth of the day.

I cover my empty raised beds with shredded leaves for the winter. This protects and improves the soil. The shredded leaves are holding in place, and haven’t blown off the beds, even though we’ve had wind storms with 50 mph gusts.

Due to my disability, we are growing some crops in raised containers in an unheated hoop house. The spinach was looking sickly yellow, instead of its normal rich green color. The spinach did that last winter, too. In both cases, it was due to the potting soil becoming too acid.  I tested the pH, and it was below 5. Very acidic!  To prevent salts from building up in the potting soil, you need to periodically water heavily enough to cause extra water to drain out through the holes in the bottom of the container. This gradually leaches lime out of the soil.

This spinach is looking very sick, due to the soil becoming too acid. After dusting the soil surface with ground limestone, the plants will regain their health in about 3 weeks.

I brought out some ground limestone, and lightly dusted it on the soil between the plants. I couldn’t mix it into the soil, as the plant roots are very dense all the way to the soil surface. I had to do the same treatment last winter, and the plants grew healthy again in about 3 weeks. I’ll need to remember to be proactive next year, and test the soil in November, before the plants start looking so sick.

This is only the third year I’ve grown crops in containers, and I’m still learning what is involved in doing it well. It is very different from working in the ground.

We finished harvesting a crop in one of my containers last month, and 10 days ago I planted seeds for miner’s lettuce and corn salad in the empty container. With our warm spell, the miner’s lettuce has already germinated. It is a winter annual, and is very cold hardy.

This miner’s lettuce is sprouting the first week of February in my unheated hoop house.

We will be eating these two green crops in late March and early April. My cold frames are not as warm as my hoop house, so I probably won’t plant any seeds in them until the beginning of March.

I love being able to work in my garden during winter. The workload is very light and easy. It won’t be long before I’ll be starting to plant many early spring crops.

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When I lived alone and had lots of unused space in my home, I just spread a plastic sheet out on the floor of a spare room and placed my vegetables in a single layer on top of it. You will always lose a few vegetables to rot, and the plastic kept the floor underneath from being damaged.

My spare rooms have always been upstairs. I couldn’t afford to heat rooms that I just used for storage, so these spare rooms usually stayed between 50-60 degrees for most of the winter.  It’s a perfect temperature to store winter squash and sweet potatoes. You don’t want to store these vegetables in a cold and damp place.

And, although 50-60 degrees is warmer that what is usually recommended to store garlic and onions, I’ve had pretty good luck with them anyway. Part of the secret is growing varieties that are good keepers. I am usually still eating all four of these vegetables in April.

My sister moved in with me last year, and my extra storage space this winter is more limited. We brainstormed how and where we wanted to keep our crops. We came up with two locations – upstairs closets in unheated areas that would stay cool over the winter.

One closet is in our upstairs bathroom, and it has large shelves already built-in. We had unexpectedly harvested nearly 250 pounds of sweet potatoes this year, and needed some sturdy shelving to hold most of them.

By late January, we’ve already made a serious dent into our stored sweet potatoes.

We didn’t have any other built-in shelving available, so my sister, Brenda, looked for some alternatives. She found these plastic stackable storage units that had generous ventilation holes, and were open in the front so we could easily select which vegetables we wanted to take down to the kitchen. These have allowed us to store a couple of hundred more pounds of vegetables in half of an upstairs hallway closet.

These stackable units are working perfectly to store some of our crops – including butternut squash, onions, garlic, and even more sweet potatoes.  We’ve already eaten most of what we had put here. We’ll need to grow even more crops next year!

We didn’t have the time or energy last fall to create a proper root cellar at our new home for our cabbage, apples, and regular potatoes, so this winter we’ve had to switch them around from one makeshift storage area to another. They store best when kept around the upper 30′s and very humid. We are keeping them in separate 5-gallon buckets.

They started out in our outdoor shed for a couple of months right after harvest in October. When it got too cold, we covered the buckets with several layers of heavy blankets. We kept a remote temperature sensor under the blankets so we could move the buckets when they dropped to the mid 30′s. I once had a neighbor that successfully stored her Irish potatoes all winter long in bushel baskets in the crawl space under her house. We don’t have a crawl space, and our basement is too warm.

Early this month, we finally had to move them into our house. We chose our coldest room, which normally stays between the upper 40′s to mid 50′s. That’s a lot warmer than I would prefer, but we don’t have a lot of choices this winter. We have already finished our apples, and only have three large heads of cabbage left. However, we did put about 20 pounds of our favorite potato variety (Yukon Gold) into our refrigerator.

We have to cover the buckets with a heavy dark blanket, so the light coming through the window doesn’t turn the potatoes green and poisonous. The buckets don’t offer any ventilation, so the moisture from the potatoes is condensing on the inside of the buckets. The potatoes are starting to sprout and send out roots, but they haven’t started to shrink and soften yet, so they are still quite usable.

These potatoes are starting to sprout because they are too warm, but they are still usable for now.

Fortunately, the cabbage heads are still looking pretty good, even though they are starting to sprout roots.

These large heads of cabbage are keeping really well, considering their less than ideal storage conditions.

I’m planning to create better storage locations for our potatoes, cabbage, and apples for next season. But even if you don’t have a good setup, you can still often store your crops for weeks or months under less than ideal conditions.

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