My Garden in Early Summer 2005
Planting the Garden

Your square foot bed contains 16 1x1 foot squares, each one planted with a different crop. Normally, there are four ways to plant or transplant in the individual squares, depending on the size of the particular plants you are using - extra large, large, medium or small sized plants. Oversized plants are handled in various other ways.

Extra-Large plants

Extra-large plants are sown or transplanted one plant per one-foot square, placed in the center of the square.

Extra-large plants are those that require about 12'' spacing after thinning. Some examples of extra-large plants:   peppers, chiles, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, corn, and eggplant.

Large plants

Large plants are sown or transplanted 4 per square. Draw a line in the soil dividing the one foot square in half, then draw another line across the square dividing the halves in half. Plant one seed or transplant one plant in the center of each of the four areas you have drawn out.

Large plants are those that require about 6'' spacing after thinning. Some examples of large plants:   chard, leaf lettuce, and parsley.

Medium plants

Medium sized plants are sown or transplanted 9 per square. Draw two lines in the soil dividing the one foot square in thirds, then draw two more lines across the square dividing the thirds into thirds, as if for a game of ''tic-tac-toe.'' Plant one seed or transplant one plant in the center of each of the nine areas you have drawn out.

Medium plants are those that require about 3'' spacing after thinning. Some examples of medium plants:   turnips, kohl-rabi, bush beans, and spinach.

Small plants

Small plants are sown 16 per square. Draw a line in the soil dividing the one foot square in half, then draw another line across the square dividing the halves in half. Use two fingers held about 2 inches apart to simultaneously poke two holes at a time, four per small section you have marked out. This will give you 16 small seed holes. Plant one seed in each of the 16 small holes.

Small plants are those that require about 2'' spacing after thinning. Some examples of small plants:   onions, radishes, beets, and carrots.

Oversized plants

Some plants, such as pole beans and peas, are not actually oversized, but are planted 8 per square on a side of the bed near a trellis. Draw a line horizontally across each 1 foot square and poke 4 holes across each half of each square, spacing them equally.

Very large plants such as tomatoes, melons and summer squash require special consideration, as they do not fit into a one-foot square. Tomatoes can be transplanted or sown one plant per 18 inch x 12 inch square. When I put a tomato plant into a 4x4 bed, I usually put it on the line dividing two adjacent squares on the north edge of the bed, giving it 24x12 inches of space. A single zucchini plant requires about 8 of the 16 squares in your bed. My preference is to plant three zucchini plants into a ''hill'' placed in the middle of a 2 foot square ''pit'' I have prepared for the purpose. I usually make 4 to 8 pits for my zucchini and a similar amount for my yellow summer squash and/or my white scallop (patty-pan) squash. See the pages on oversized plants and vertical gardening for good ways to accomplish this.

Planting seeds

Use a finger to poke a shalow hole into the planting medium (soil), using the instructions on the seed packet as a guide. Put one seed into the hole and cover it with vermiculite or with more planting medium. Water carefully so as not to disturb the seed by splashing until the seed has sprouted and become big enough to be stable.

Generally speaking, the thickness of the seed determines how deep to bury it; a good rule of thumb is that there should be approximately enough soil or planting media covering the soil to equal 5 times that seed's thickness.

You can pretty much safely ignore all other spacing information on the planting packet, with the exception that the final spacing between plants after thinning can tell you how many plants you can safely put into one square foot, as indicated above.