Planting a raised bed garden is a simple process. By now, you’ve built your garden framework, mixed your perfect soil and everything is ready for the fun part.
In his latest revision of “Square Foot Gardening”, Mel Bartholomew recommends actually building a grid and leaving it on your bed, rather than stretching string across to form a square foot pattern. Either way, the raised bed garden is divided into “square feet” which makes for much easier planting. And the permanent grid is actually rather decorative, too.
Now you have to decide what you want to plant. You can mix all sorts of plants into this raised bed garden, but stick to the square foot rule.
If you look at the back of your seed packet, you will find basic planting instructions, including spacing. As I look at the back of a pack of Golden Wax bush beans, I see that the spacing is “20 inches / 4 inches”. That translates to 20 inches between the rows and 4 inches between the plants.
We have a raised bed garden, so we disregard the row spacing. It doesn’t apply to us because we don’t have to move any equipment down the row for cultivating or harvesting. So we concentrate on the 4 inches between the plants.
Four inches between plants is the spacing required in all directions. So, if we go to our square foot grid, we can see that we would get 9 bean plants in that one square foot by spacing the seeds every four inches. Broccoli requires 12 inches between plants, so we could only put one plant right in the center of one square on the grid.
The spacing for marigolds is 6 inches… which translates to 4 plants in a square foot of our raised bed garden.
Personally, I like to mix some flowers right in with my vegetables. It’s pretty that way and the flowers attract the bees we need for good pollination. Some flowers, like marigolds, actually repel a number of undesirables, thereby helping us keep our raised bed garden as natural as possible.
With a raised bed garden in Southwest Florida, you should be able to have something growing pretty much year round. In the worst heat of the summer or if you live on the northern edge of this area and have a threat of frost, it’s a simple matter to cover the raised bed garden and your crop. A bamboo pole (or other stake) drivin into the ground at the four corners of the bed can support either shade cloth or and old sheet to protect your plants. Remember to plant according to the seasons, though.
Broccoli and other cole plants such as cabbage and cauliflower, prefer cooler temperatures. Plant them to grow during our winter months. Tomatoes and most other vegetables that are grown during the summer months up north like more moderate temperatures. Plant them in the early spring (or late winter) to avoid frost but so they’ll be matured and finished by June when it starts to get hot. And during the dog days of summer, consider planting some of the “different” plants, those more suitable for a tropic climate. More about those later.