The Benefits of Planting in Beds Arranging your garden into beds has many benefits. First, it allows you to create larger blocks of plants spaced perfectly apart in shorter rows. This creates a “living mulch” that discourages weeds, retains soil moisture, and lessens soil compaction and erosion. Second, arranging your Read more…
In Bed Spacing Blocks of Short Rows In your beds, plant your seeds or seedlings in blocks of short rows, and space your rows the same distance apart as you space your seeds or seedlings within rows. Offset vs. Random Spacing If you want to get precise, you can use Read more…
How Big of Beds? Many people say three-to-five-feet wide and however long you like. I say, make your beds as wide or as narrow as you like. It’s your garden. Experiment and see what works for you for each set of plants and your space. What We Do and Why Read more…
Planting in Beds However you decide to organize your garden and however you decide to loosen your soil, planting in beds instead of individual rows is one of the most powerful actions you can take for the health of your plants because it consolidates your paths around blocks of your Read more…
Lessons from Roots: Why Our Plants Do Best in Wide Beds That Are Loosened Deeply We understand that our garden plants need rich, deep, well-drained, well-loosened soil that’s full of organic matter, but how deep and how loose is ideal? Why so deep? And why is planting in beds so Read more…
What’s the Best Mulch? If done correctly, the best mulch is the plants themselves, followed by straw. Using Plant Foliage as a Living Mulch It’s possible to let plants’ foliage aid their roots by casting enough shade to keep the soil moisture that’s necessary for themselves and all of the Read more…
Past Paradigms Walk into a garden in the 1950s and you can guess the layout: rows. We can all imagine them. They’re the most salient feature of gardens from that era—and many through today. Seeing it in person or in our mind’s eye, we can even imagine the process: a Read more…