Intensive Gardening: 5 Tips to Maximize Yield

Finding space for your locavore’s garden might be a challenge if you’re an urban sort. As an urban gardener I have a few good thoughts on using every last inch of space.

There are other names for this sensible approach, but let’s use intensive gardening.

Another thing I like about intensive gardening is that it means less work.

Less work?

That’s right. With a bit of planning you can fit more plants into a smaller space.

• You dig, prepare, and maintain less garden
• You have fewer weeds because densely growing crops crowd out weeds
• You have less area to cover when watering

Here is my approach to intensive gardening.

1. Decrease recommended plant spacing.

When I grow plants in rows I reduce the recommended plant spacing anywhere from a quarter to a third. I don’t always get perfect specimen plants, but the denser crop canopy shades out more weeds.

In some cases, I cut spacing by a third, much more...maybe by 80%. Why? Denser planting means something to eat sooner.

How? Think of carrots. When planted too closely together they require thinning. As I thin them out, I have baby carrots for supper, leaving the carrots in the garden with more space. So please, don’t follow recommended spacing on seed packets.

2. Make wide rows.

I like to grow plants in blocks or wide rows, very rarely in single rows. Wider rows means less space is used for pathways...and space is at a premium in my garden.

Some plants grow very well in wide rows, others don’t.

Here are examples of plants that grow well in a wide row:

• carrots (which I interplant these with radishes)
• beets
• garlic

For plants that don’t grow well in a wide row, I still avoid wasteful single rows. Let’s consider tomato plants: When in a wide row, the plants at the centre of the row get very scraggly, producing little.

Here are a couple ways to intensify your tomato planting:

• My tomato row is two plants wide—not a solid block of plants as I do with carrots. Two-plants-wide rows means increased plant density—but still allows adequate space for good fruit development.
• My neighbour Demetrious does it differently: He plants three or four tomato plants in a circle around a tee-pee like structure made of angled stakes.

3. Extend the growing season.

Here are my favourite season-extending tips:

HOTBED

At the end of February I make a trip to a horse stable to get fresh manure and straw. I place these in a hole in the garden, cover with soil and a cold frame—and I have a hotbed that gives me fresh greens well before anything else is ready in the garden. As the manure decomposes it gives off heat, heating the soil from underneath. At the same time, the cold frame holds in some of the heat. Great for growing greens!

COMPOST PILE

I have two compost piles: An active one to which I’m adding kitchen and garden waste; and an inactive one that I’m letting decompose further before adding to the garden.

If you have an inactive compost pile, cover it with soil and grow plants on it. Like the hotbed, the pile gives off some heat, warming the soil. This works very well for cucumbers, squash, and melon plants. I grow my summer squash plants on the compost pile.

BLACK POTS

Want to extend the season for heat-loving plants like okra and eggplant? The solution is big black plastic pots. I use 20 gallon pots.

The black pots warm quickly in the sun, giving a warm root-zone to heat-loving plants. This is especially helpful if you have a heavy clay soil, which warms up more slowly than light, sandy soils.

SHOCK TREATMENT

I love lettuce, and always make a few successive plantings of it. But very often there’s too much ready at a given time. If you have perfect lettuce plants, more than you can eat, here’s a trick to prevent the plants from flowering (bolting) and becoming bitter before you can eat them: Dig and transplant them. The shock will often temporarily turn off the plant’s readiness to bolt, extending your lettuce season.

4. Interplant different vegetables.

The idea here is to maximize output by combining crops with different germinating and growing speeds; or short and tall plants; or sun and shade-loving ones.

Here are a few things I do:

• I seed radishes along with crops such as carrots and beets. The radishes are up and harvested well before the carrots and beets need the space.
• I underplant tomatoes with lettuce seed. The lettuce doesn’t need full sunlight and isn’t tall like tomatoes, keeping the ground under the tomatoes covered and minimizing weed growth.
• I grow garlic in a wide row. It’s a bulb, which, once up and growing, doesn’t seem bothered by the lettuce, spinach, and endive that I have growing in the row.

5. Grow plants upwards instead of outwards.

My favourite space saver is to grow cucumbers along a fence. Here are some other things that work well for me:

• Grow squash vines along a hedge (the squash fruit become suspended in the hedge, which provides support).
• Allow pole beans to grow amongst asparagus plants. When the asparagus harvest is done, grow the beans to trail amongst those tall, feathery, space-taking asparagus ferns—it’s a bit messy, but makes good use of the space.
• Train cucumbers up the side of a building. The west-facing side of my garage is where I do this. It doesn’t get as much sun as a south-facing wall—but cucumbers do well in this partial sun.

6. Plant crops in succession.

Nothing complicated here, just don’t waste any growing space. Here are some examples of what I like to do:

• I follow broad beans with rutabaga.
• When garlic is done I plant rapini.
• Peas make way for a crop of beets, which, being planted later in the season, will be the perfect size for pickling

Read more about vertical gardening.

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