Winter has given me plenty of time away from growing to sort out the garden plans at our new site, and starting from scratch here has given cause to re-question our bed layout practices. Should I still use standard bed sizes? Should those sizes change? Is north-south bed orientation better than east-west bed orientation? How could our larger growing space be segmented into unique zones with different characteristics? With a blank slate, every decision is open for consideration again.
You may be surprised that after all these years of growing, I am still approaching the planning of our new site with so many genuine questions in my mind. These questions are motivated by one underlying answer that I DID have, which was that I did NOT want to build these garden plots more than once! Therefore, if there was cause to change something about our bed layout standards, this would be the year to do it. Let's walk through the subject of bed layout one step at a time and I'll show you how our plans are shaping up.
Bed Standards
The first answer I was sure about was the ongoing need for standards in our bed layout. I have seen too many benefits of our standard beds over the years to abandon all structure and just start planting random rows of crops amidst a giant patch of tilled soil. The standard bed is here to stay.
The term "standard bed" implies two qualities about a garden plan. I use the term "bed" to refer to a growing space that can contain multiple rows of a crop, like carrots. There is no need for a gardener to step between every single row of their carrots, so the bed removes the unnecessary walking spaces and groups multiple rows of carrots together to cover a wider bed with a continuous carpet of carrots. I use the term "standard" to imply that the physical dimensions of the beds are kept consistent throughout the garden. A standard bed size means that all my trellises, row covers, hoops, and irrigation equipment are compatible with every bed in my garden. That efficiency alone is enough to sell me on the standard bed, but benefits don't stop there. When my beds and pathways are always in the same space, my soil improvement efforts help build the bed quality year after year, and the weed pressure in my pathways continues to decrease because the compacted soil and mulch there is never disturbed.
Bed Zones
As much as I would love to standardize everything in my garden, it's also obvious that the many crops we grow will have different needs. An apple tree and a row of lettuce mix are just not alike enough to be crammed into the same box and given the same treatments. That's where zoning comes into play. If we define a few key zones that cater to specific crop selections, we can then carry on with our standard bed practice within those zones. You can see these zones defined pretty clearly in the site plan below even before I explain them.
The first tiny zone is our family's kitchen garden beds. This zone is devoted to crops that are planted in small quantities and often requiring more attention. Examples of crops that would suit this zone would be small successions of salad greens and herbs and small plantings of continuous harvest crops like cucumbers and broccolini that need picking almost every day. Since we'll want to visit this zone very regularly, it makes the most sense to locate it closest to our home.
The second zone focusses on our most intensive production with a collection of tightly spaced 50 square foot beds. An area of this scale could be devoted to homestead garden crops (ie. shelling peas, tomatoes, carrots, etc.) and/or a small market garden ( ie. lettuce mix, snacking cucumbers, summer squash). We'll use it for both. My favourite feature planned for this space is a moveable high tunnel. The sidewalls will be mounted on wheels so that the whole tunnel can roll from one group of beds to another throughout the same growing season.
In the third zone, we're planning production suitable for pick-your-own production, and if people will be passing through here with kids, wagons, or strollers, we're just going to need more space. That's why you see a big leap in bed size in this zone along with more widely spaced beds. This wider spacing means that this space will generate a lower income per square foot, but with the right crop choices and a pick-your-own format, the labour can also be reduced, so the hope is that the space can help increase the income of our farm without significantly impacting our labour in the busy time of the summer.
And finally at the far western end of our property, is the orchard. When we moved here last summer, fruit trees and shrubs were scattered about zones 2 and 3, but we've already begun the process of clearing out those areas for more intensive vegetable production. From now on, we'll devote our orchard improvement efforts to this forth zone. Since fruit trees demand the least maintenance of all of our crops, it makes the most sense to give them the zone furthest from our home. The grid of fruit trees in the screenshot below will be a mix of dwarf apples and plums and the rows of taller shrubs are representing Saskatoon berries.
Bed Sizing
Since we're starting with a blank slate on this land, I am totally free to change the size of our standard beds, but after some reflection, I'm still pretty happy with the bed sizes we have been using in the city.
Our smallest standard beds in our kitchen garden are just 15 ft² and this has been comfortable for our smallest plantings. Our larger 20 ft long field beds give us 50 ft² each and I still find this size appropriate for family scale bulk plantings of crops like onions, carrots, and potatoes. It's also a good size for my small market garden plantings of lettuce mix and well...everything else. A lot of planting and harvesting jobs on a 50 ft² bed can be done by one person in half an hour and result in a reasonable volume of production. I wouldn't want to deal with units any smaller for a market garden, and when I need more of something, I can always plant more beds.
The new bed size we'll be adding is a 100 ft long bed that gives us 250 ft² of production. All of the beds in the zone 3 pick-your-own garden will be this size. The larger bed size makes sense here, because these beds will focus on crops that produce less per square foot and/or crops that need to be available in larger quantities. In past farm seasons, I grew just four 50 ft² beds of strawberries so that I could sprinkle a few berries into our farm subscription boxes early in the season, but this scale of production would get cleaned out pretty fast by a few keen pick-your-own customers. We'll need larger beds to increase the flow of berries and serve more pick-you-own customers, so we'll increase that strawberry planting from 200 ft² total to 1000 ft² total and see how that goes. Other beds in this zone include the taller trellised raspberries, and family-friendly pick-your-own crops like winter squash, potatoes, carrots, beets, onions for example. What these crops have in common is they are not too picky in terms of harvest timing so they don't immediately depreciate if they are not harvested on a certain day, and they're all pretty forgiving to handle. There will likely be a few other crops we add to that list, but that's the general idea.
I've discussed the subject of bed size pretty quickly here, but I don't want you to think that I'm just pulling these bed sizes out of thin air and hoping for the best, because if you do that in your own planning, you're scale of production is going to be way off. If your bed size is too small, you'll be unnecessarily subdividing your growing space for each crop into an excessive number of beds, wasting a lot of space on walkways, and spending more on materials like irrigation equipment. If your bed size is too large, you'll find yourself always splitting the beds into halves or quarters so that you can plant smaller amounts of each crop, but managing different growing patterns in the same bed at the same time leads to complicated and inefficient uses of equipment like trellises and row covers. When your beds are sized appropriately to match your scale of production in each zone, you shouldn't have to split up your beds that much to grow less of something and you shouldn't have to plant a huge number of beds to grow enough of something. Therefore, bed size optimization depends on careful recording keeping and a little math, not just guessing.
What I'm not covering here is that I have come to these conclusions about bed size with the use of our Production Calculator, which uses years of our yield data to make accurate predictions about how much food any size bed size will produce for each crop. We can use this Production Calculator to determine the ideal bed size and/or number of beds to plant for each crop based on the amount of food we want to harvest. This calculator is a part of the Seed to Table course package so students can accelerate their planning work and be sure to grow the right amount of each crop.
Bed Orientation
Again, the lack of space restrictions on this site gives me pretty free choice of my bed orientation, but should I run my beds from East to West or from North to South? I have had plenty of experience with both bed orientations over the years. Often the physical restraints of my tight urban sites have had the biggest influence on the chosen orientation, such as in the examples below.
My preference and top recommendation is still to run beds from North to South whenever possible because this orientation gives the best balance of light exposure to each bed and prevents taller beds from shading shorter beds behind them. For example, a tall bed of trellised cucumbers that is running from East to West will shade the bed to the North for most of the day so that shaded bed space becomes a lot less valuable to me. A North to South bed orientation avoids this problem. This is the main reason that the majority of our beds will use a North to South orientation.
The exception to this preferred bed orientation is in our market garden zone where I really wanted to incorporate a moving high tunnel. I could have had a very short tunnel rolling from North to South, but then it would have only covered one 20ft long section of beds at a time. I want my tunnel to cover more space and it's also a lot nicer to have consecutive beds when lowering and leaning tall vines of cucumbers and tomatoes on our trellises. So to achieve moveable tunnel dream work a little better, I am going to use a section of East to West beds in our market garden zone. This will allow the tunnel lots of room to roll in either direction so that it can cover 1 of 3 groups of 10 beds at any time in the season. When using this East to West orientation, I'll just need to be a bit more careful with my use of trellises here so that I don't permanently shade any of my beds.
There is some insight into the bed layout decisions I've been making in the planning phase of our new garden site. I'm thankful that the wisdom I've gained from previous years now enables me to proceed confidently with these plans for bed zones, sizing, and orientation, but that confidence doesn't mean that some of these plans won't change over time. It's very likely that something new I do in this next year will turn out to be a mistake, and that's how I'll learn the next lessons I need. The best way to progress through this period of uncertainty is to start...so here we go! If you're just starting a new garden or refining your use of beds, then I hope the logic I shared here has helped with your planning.
