Want to maximize your space with clever garden design ideas? This guide provides eight tips to transform even the smallest area into a thriving garden.
Cramming Your Garden Design
When gardening in a small space, consider cramming the design and the plants into that design. If working with a limited area, one approach is to bring the bed in at least halfway more. Back in the day, there was about a foot spacing between all of the raised beds, and then containers were even put into that spacing, creating a tiptoeing situation around the garden. It worked, allowing for growing about 50 or 60% more plants.
Breaking Spacing Rules
Consider breaking some of the classic spacing rules. For example, with lettuce, instead of standard spacing, an intensive approach is to plant lettuce in a triangular style spacing.The space can be compressed into about 50% of the space with a little bit of sacrifice on just the annoyance of dealing with it.
Growing Vertically
Growing vertically is a perfect method to maximize food production in a small space. Over the years, different vertical gardens have been built using plastic bottles, creating another layer of growing plants above the garden. Ensure to select HDPE 2 plastic, which is the safest plastic to use in the garden. A vertical trellis can also be built with a bit of DIY. Alternatively, bamboo can be used to build a structure for peas or beans by simply placing them in a circle and joining them together at the top. This is called a teepee, and it’s a super easy and effective system
The Magic of Grow Bags
Grow bags are a small space gardening essential. These can be used extensively in a small space. With the handles, it is easy to move it around. In the old days, these would be slotted into random spots in the garden, wherever there was a gap, sometimes even putting them on top of raised beds. For a crop, like potatoes, or onions, or something where planting is occurring, and waiting for that growth to come up, it doesn’t even need to be in sun. These can be kept in the garage or the backyard while planting out potatoes, and then move them into the garden the second that they actually needed light, which allowed growing something else in a grow bag in that space before the potatoes needed to come out. Because they’re so portable, they can be moved around. When first moving into this space, what was done is some quick landscape fabric was laid down and a grow bag garden was put in place. In about a 10 by 10 square foot area, it is possible to have 25 grow bags. So you can grow a ton in these little guys.
The Benefits of Comfrey
This plant is called comfrey and is the absolute golden ticket for every organic gardener. It produce flowers, which attracts pollinators, but also the wide leaves shade the soil protecting the soil biology. And he has a long taproot, which withdraws the minerals down deep into the ground in a bioavailable form for your plants. So you can simply chop it down into pieces, add it into an old sock, and submerge this sock into a tank of water. And then you can use that water to water your garden and have a completely free source of fertilizer. Alternatively, you can add it straight into your raised bed. So it will slowly decompose and provide food for your plants. But you can also use it in a sort of tea infused solution to reactivate your compost because it’s full of nitrogen, or you can place it around your plant. So chop and drop as it’s normally called, and it will create a barrier against slugs and snails. If you’re limited it on space, growing this swamp plant will give you a wide variety if you use this in your garden.
Selecting the Right Plant Varieties
One of the great things about gardening is that you can grow hundreds of plants, hundreds of different types of plants for the same plant. Like tomatoes, there’s probably 4,000 different varieties. So if you’re a small space grower, there is a variety for you. Look for anything that says space in the name, anything that has the word patio in the name. Back in the day, there was a condo in downtown San Diego with a west facing balcony. A railing planter was used, and patio baby or patio choice were put in, or if it was a cucumber, spacemaster was selected. All of those allow you to grow one of your favorite crops without having it trawling all over the place and just making an absolute mess. Some crops you might want to avoid. Corn in a really small space is kind of difficult. You have to plant it in blocks. It’s been done in grow bags, but again, a little bit more of an advanced technique. Huge pumpkins, huge squash, absolutely massive indeterminate tomatoes, stay away from those and go for some smaller varieties. There are hundreds of options out there for you.
