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Intensive Vegetable Gardens
On this page find plants, practices, and ideas for making your home vegetable garden more productive, including:
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- Making space for a producing vegetable garden in a small-space yard.
- Traditional methods and practices for increasing vegetable garden yield.
- Using intensive vegetable gardening methods to increase yields and crops.
- Sequential plantings to increasing yield from home vegetable gardens.
- The role of careful soil preparation to increase productivity of home vegetable gardens.
The Intensive Planting Approach
Use intensive techniques to balance available space with productivity. You’ll get more vegetables from your small vegetable garden by learning these proven traditional intensive techniques.
Modest vegetable gardens produce all the vegetables, berries, fruit and leafy greens you’ll want, and you’ll still leaves ample space for your other backyard activities.
Would-be vegetable gardeners with small yards often choose these special gardening practices as a sure way to grow more vegetables:
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- Raised beds, planting boxes and containers,
- Carefully prepared soil, and
- Multiple plantings of successions of vegetables instead of harvesting only once [see Planting Vegetable Successions].
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As you harvest cool-season vegetables, you’ll be able to remove the first planting and replant that area with warm-season vegetables.
Do-It-Yourself
If possible, choose a bed location in your yard with full sun exposure from morning to evening, or one with as much sunlight as possible.
Remove any turf or weeds from the site. Next, turn the native soil over once with a spade and test it [see Testing Soil]. Then add any necessary fertilizers, organic material or amendments.
With the additives on top of your bed’s soil, double-dig the soil to incorporate them into your native soil [see Amending Soil].
Once you’ve worked the soil under your future bed, install bed edgings or raised-bed walls; they’ll define the bed. Also leave ample room for access paths for walking and for garden carts or wheelbarrows. (The best-sized beds are built no wider than a normal person’s reach— 3 ft. (90 cm)—from one or more of its edges, with pathways spaced at least 32 in. (81 cm) between beds.)
Preparing to Plant
Prior to planting fill the bed to its brim with a blended mix of organic compost, sand and native topsoil. Water it and allow the new soil to settle for a few days, topping it off as necessary. Then you’re ready to plant.
Many vegetables are deep-rooted and extend their roots far below the soil’s surface. They grow down through the topcoat and into the amended native soil beneath the bed. There, they’ll find all the nutrients, organics, and trace minerals you conveniently provided them prior to planting.
If green manure is used, do the bed preparation in the autumn. That allows the fertilizer to decompose and compost over the winter months. Otherwise, choose composted, weed-free manure. It has less nitrogen and will protect your tender transplants [see Sites and Soils].
That’s all there is to it. Despite their daunting name, these proven traditional intensive techniques are really simple skills you can use to grow and harvest more vegetables from your small vegetable garden.
Intensive Methods for Small-Space Gardens
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