In the January Week 2 Calendar I mentioned laying out your garden rows with lots of space in between. It’s getting time to start really thinking about your garden layout. Most every garden I’ve ever seen is a rectangular tilled up plot that the gardener furrows out narrow rows with narrow walking paths in between the rows.
You could not possibly make gardening any harder.
Imagine the cellular telephone commercial with “the bars”. This is what you want to do to layout your garden. Create bars; only make them all the same length.
Gardening is 75% planning. You must think through what vegetables you want to grow. If you are a new gardener, you will want to plant everything you see. Go ahead. Get it out of your system.
Once you know what you want to grow, you must know what family groups each plant belongs to. Why? Because, you must rotate your crops to prevent soil bourn diseases from running rampant in your garden. But that is another topic for later. Right now we must make our plots.
In the traditional garden described above, the gardener has not choice but to walk between his rows in his tilled plot to tend his/her crops. You should NEVER walk on your garden plot. It voids all the effort you pout into it to fluff it up into a nice loose soil. Walking on it compacts it into a texture similar to a brick.
If you separate your rows, you never walk on your garden plot ever again.
Layout your rows wider than a single crop row. Lean over and pretend to tend a plant that is as far away as you are comfortable reaching. From the tip of your toes to your hand is how far? Double that distance, add a few inches on for “edging” and that is the width you want your rows to be. This width may be dictated more by the width of your tiller if you are like me, and have a tractor with an attached 4-5 foot wide tiller. If you own a portable type, then walk it down one side, and back up the other, being careful to not walk in the row.
Now is a good time to say tilling is not the best thing you can do for your garden. But if you never walk on the tilled soil, and you grow your local grass (try to avoid a monoculture) in between the rows, so that the loose soil is not washed away, and mulch, you can till without doing too much harm.
Lay out your rows. Make them all the same width, and make all the grass strips in between the same width. To determine the grass strip width, take your mower and mow along the edge of the tilled row. Turn the mower around and mow the next “lane” of grass, only don’t do a full width of your mower. The idea is to get it all cut in two swipes, cleanly with no edges to need trimming. You don’t want it so close that it is tight - you need room to get wheel barrows and such up and down the aisles.
Now that you have the general idea of how to lay the rows out, you must determine how much tilled area you need. With these wide rows, you can plant tomatoes staggered from side to side or 4-5 rows of field peas. Spacing plants is another big topic for later. I think it was the thing that took me the longest to deal with properly.
Because of the aforementioned crop rotation that needs to be done, you should make at least 1 more row than you need, 2 is better, if you have the room. Plot out your rows with your mower and your tiller as measuring devices, then immediately cover your tilled soil with some kind of mulch.
Do this right the first time. Once you get your plots turned into premium gardening soil, you really are not going to want to move the rows. Think it through, draw it, stake it, whatever it takes. I just laid mine out with the riding mower….