Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: meriad on November 07, 2018, 10:29
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someone in another post mentioned a website so off I went to google as you do, and came across this....
https://www.quickcrop.co.uk/square-foot-gardening
May be useful for some? I'm not 100% sure about the spacing of everything but if people here agree that it's right then I'd be very tempted to give this a go myself next year
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I mainly use square foot gardening and I love it. You can grow so much more in a smaller space. I no longer dig and dig for england. I have put half my allotment over to fruit trees and I am producing the same amount of veggies on the other half as I did before with less effort.
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I partially use it for some crops in my raised beds, things like beetroot and salad crops, but I still use traditional rows for my beans and peas.
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It's very useful if you are growing in small beds where it's possible to keep fertility high, and many people use it for their garden beds. Close spacing often means smaller plants, because of root competition, and needs higher imput of feed/compost as none of the soil ever gets a rest.
I'm all for getting as much as I can from the plot, but thinking to plant up every inch seems a bit intense when there is more space available on the allotment, so I don't use it on mine ;)
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That does make sense mumofstig, very good point.
Also how would it work with crop rotation if you're putting lots of everything into a bed. Hmm so more thinking about it and planning it to be done
thanks all
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I started off with Square foot gardening with 3off 4 ft raised beds.
Manage to grow lots of different plants successfully.
Broccoli was a challenge as they crowded out the smaller plants, was a good in other ways though as it led to me getting an allotment.
However I cannot get my head around the logic of spacing in lines as opposed to square foot.
Example:
It says “Onions should be spaced 2 to 4 inches apart, with 12 to 18 inches between row”
Square foot says 16 per square foot that is 3 inches apart making 16 off.
I would be very interested in hearing the reason for leaving 12 to 18 inches between rows.
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Onion roots grow larger than 3in diameter, so by placing them close together, you don't get large onions because of root competition. In the old row system they were still quite close, but the 'walking' space between rows, allowed a bigger root spread and made it possible to hoe/weed a long row.
In narrower beds, on the plot, I tend to plant them equidistant apart, but still not as close as square ft spacings.
Space the plants 4 to 5 inches apart in the row to produce large-sized bulbs (closer spacing significantly decreases bulb size) or space 2 to 2 _ inches apart and harvest every other plant as a green onion. Allow 12 to 18 inches between rows or space onions 6 to 8 inches apart in all directions in beds
https://extension.illinois.edu/veggies/onion.cfm
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After a quick shufti at the webpage, having given up the allotment I thought it was more useful to someone like myself relying on the back garden. I shall certainly be looking at it more closely.
Cheers, Tony.
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“walking' space between rows” is this the true reason for leaving 12 to 18 inches between rows?
If that is the case I can see why it is not needed in Square foot.
Back to spacing what if the rows were staggered so the onions are not opposite each other would that allow enough space.