– Updated & Refreshed January 2022 –
Raised garden bed plant spacing, if done correctly, can nearly triple production compared to traditional row gardening in raised garden beds.
The key is to plant by area as opposed to rows. Row gardening is designed to leave walking paths between plants so you can access everything. However, raised garden beds are designed (or at least should be designed) so you can always reach the center of your garden from one side or another. That’s why there is always a dimension of 4ft or less with our garden beds.
In this Episode, Bryan gives you a quick and easy to understand tutorial on raised garden bed plant spacing using peppers, carrots, and tomatoes as an example, so you can see how to make the most of your planting area!
Personal recommendation from Bryan. If you’re excited about all the plants you can grow in your now more efficiently spaced garden, check out Eden Brothers Seeds. They have a beautiful variety of heirloom seeds!
Transcript
Intro
On this episode I show you how plant spacing works in a raised garden bed, so you can make the most of your growing area!
Hi everyone, I’m Bryan Traficante from GardenInMinutes and this is Episode #11 of Easy Growing. On today’s episode, I’ll be explaining how plant spacing works in a raised garden bed so you can make the most of your growing area and grow as much as possible in the space that you have. Now we’re going to get into a little bit of math, but I promise it’s really really easy!
Plant by Area, Not by Rows
More or less, the premise behind it is that in a raised garden bed you want to plant by area as opposed to rows. Reason being, if you consider the design of a garden bed… there’s always going to be a section that’s 4ft or less. The reason being is that if you have section that’s 4ft or less, like all of our garden beds, you can reach the center of everything that you’re growing without needing a pathway to walk down.
So if you consider a traditional garden, you’d have rows of plants with a space to walk down so you could reach everything. Since you can reach everything in a raised garden bed by arms length, you don’t need that and you can plant in that valuable space.
So what you want to do is take your garden bed and consider it as having planting sections within it. That’s really where The Garden Grid™ comes in handy. The Garden Grid™ basically splits up your planting area into square foot sections.
Now, consider the plant spacing on the back of a seed packet of bell pepper. Each bell pepper spaces out roughly 12 inches from another. Then you would have a row in between it for you to typically walk down. Since we’re in a raised garden bed though and we don’t need row spacing, you just get rid of that number. Just consider your plant spacing with it.
The Simple Math Used to Calculate Plant Spacing
So, if you have roughly square foot sections broken out with a Garden Grid™ and you need 12 inches for each pepper plant… you can go ahead and plant 1 pepper plant per square. Reason being is that between each plant you still have your 12 inches, but you don’t need to have the row spacing between them to walk through, and that’s the math behind it! You more or less divide up your length and width by the plant spacing need for each plant you’re growing.
So let’s get a little bit more advanced, we’ll take a carrot. Most carrots need about four inches between each carrot plant in order to grow. If you have your 4 inches and you have your 12, roughly 12 by 12 inch spacing area, you divide that up by the 4 inches you need for each carrot.
So you can grow three carrots wide by three carrots deep, meaning you can grow 9 carrots per Garden Grid™ square. And that’s the math you use for basically any other plant you want to grow in your raised garden.
If you want to take something a little more popular like a tomato, tomatoes are just like the bell peppers. They need about 12 inches of plant spacing. So you can grow 1 plant for each square. Meaning you would have 4 plants for a 2 by 2 area, just like our 2×2 Garden Grid™ here.
Reference Our Raised Garden Plant Spacing Guide to Help
We actually have a plant spacing guide on our blog. So if you need to reference any other raised garden bed plant spacing, we have over 60 plants in there to look through and decide on… and that’s it!
Alright and that’s it for Easy Growing Episode #11. Thank you all so much for watching. Please leave your comments, your questions. I’ve left the link to our plant spacing guide just below this video. Other than that, I hope you all have a wonderful day. See you next time!
