Vegetable Gardening (117 page)

1 plant per square:
Tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, eggplant, corn, melon, squash

4 plants per square:
Lettuce, garlic, Swiss chard

8 plants per square:
Pole beans, peas, spinach

16 plants per square:
Beets, carrots, radishes, onions

By planting so few plants, you'll have many small harvests, and you can easily make more succession plantings and rotate plantings each year. (I talk about crop rotation later in this chapter.)

For more information about square foot gardening techniques, look for the book
All New
Square Foot Gardening,
by Mel Bartholomew (published by Cool Springs Press), his videos, or visit this Web site:
www.squarefootgardening.com
.

Rotating Crops to Preserve Soil Nutrients and Maintain a Pest-Free Bed

If you plant the same vegetables in the same spot year after year, you're going to cause a number of problems, including these:

Insects and diseases that spend part of their life cycle in the soil will build up there and be more difficult to control.

Specific nutrients that the vegetables need will consistently be depleted and will be harder to replace.

The way around these problems is to rotate your crops from season to season. In other words, plant them in different beds, as far away as possible from where they were planted before. Crop rotation is easy if you keep a journal and make note of what was planted where. And if you keep things out of the same beds for 3 years, you'll probably be in good shape.

It's important to do more than rotate individual crops. You should rotate families of crops as well. In Part II, I talk about vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes being in the same family. A disease or insect that attacks one plant in a family is likely to attack others. Blight on tomatoes and potatoes is an example. When rotating crops, make sure you don't plant a family member in the same spot 3 years in a row. For example, in one bed, plant beans (legume family), the next year plant potatoes (tomato family), and the third year plant cucumbers (squash family). After that, you can start over with another legume-family vegetable or start another rotation series. Keep the families apart for 3 years, and you'll have fewer problems in the veggie patch.

If you only have one sunny spot to garden, consider using containers as a way to rotate crops. For example, plant your tomatoes in a container one year and in the garden the next.

Planting by the Phases of the Moon

Planting by the phases of the moon isn't just a New Age technique. It actually has been used for eons by many ancient farmers and gardeners. They noticed that certain vegetables perform better when planted during different moon phases. The planting seasons don't really change, but planting dates during those seasons become very important.

Here's how moon gardening works: If you divide the 28-day moon cycle (from the new moon to the full moon and back to the new moon) into quarters, as any calendar does, certain quarters are thought to be better than others for planting specific vegetables. The following list gives you an idea of what to plant when, according to the moon cycle:

The first quarter,
when the moon goes from new moon (invisible) to a quarter visible, is thought to be best for planting asparagus, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and other vegetables that produce their seeds on parts of the plant that aren't eaten.

The second quarter,
when the moon goes from half to full, is best for planting vegetables in which the seeds are eaten, such as beans, tomatoes, peppers, and squash.