Southwest Florida Gardening

On the back of every seed packet, you’ll find the recommended plant spacing. It will be something like “space 12 inches, rows 3 feet apart”. You may wonder if that implies that plants are larger in one direction than the other, based on that recommendation for plant spacing.

Truth is, in the example above, the plants need 12 inches of space. That means you can plant one of them every 12 inches in all directions without worrying about crowding. The row spacing is not for the plants’ benefit, it’s so we can get down the row with our cultivators or harvest wagons or other tools without stepping on our plants in the process. That row spacing is a good thing in a field of corn where the cultivation or weeding is done with a huge tractor. It’s a huge waste of resources in a back yard garden.

Before you start planting everything 12 inches apart in all directions, though, stop and think of how you are going to cultivate and then, later, harvest the crop.

You must be able to reach each plant without stepping on the one next to it.

Now you see why we recommend a raised bed that is no more than 4 feet wide. You can plant it and reach into it to the center, from either side. So, you can plant according to the seed packet recommendations without worrying about overcrowding… and without wasting that 3 feet between rows.

In a conventional garden that is 100 feet long, you will have a number of rows, each 100 feet long. If your plants are spaced 12 inches apart in each row, you will have 100 plants per row. And if you have the rows 3 feet apart, it means your row of 100 plants will take up at least 300 square feet.

Now, if you were to make one long continuous raised bed that was 3 feet wide and 100 feet long (not really a recommended configuration), and you spaced your plants 12 inches (1 foot) apart all over that raised bed, you’d have 300 plants growing instead of just 100, in the same amount of space.

Get the picture? A raised bed garden will let you plant more in the same amount of space.