My late husband, Duane, and I wrote vegetable garden books, including The Postage Stamp Garden Book; California Vegetable Patch; Small Space, Big Yields; The Postage Stamp Kitchen Garden Book; The Vegetable Factory, The Vegetable Gardeners Sourcebook, and more. Duane, in 1976, pioneered the French Intensive Biodynamic small space garden era with The Postage Stamp Garden book. Over the years our garden books have one thing in common, small gardens using the French Intensive Biodynamic Gardening method.  Using intensive methods, you can, for instance, grow as many carrots in 1 square foot as you can in a 12-foot row in a conventional garden. Properly handled, a 24-square-foot bed (5 by 5 feet) will produce a minimum of 200 pounds of vegetables. The smallest beds I recommend are 4 x 4 feet, the largest, 10 by 10 feet (although they can be bigger). I also recommend raised bed gardens. Regardless of which size you choose, your postage stamp garden will produce a tremendous amount of vegetables, and after the initial preparation, require little extra work, even less if you add a drip system to do the watering.
Where to Locate Your Garden
- Place your garden where it gets at least six hours of direct sun a day, since most vegetables need that much.
- Keep your garden bed at least 20 feet from shallow-rooted trees such as elms, maples, and poplars. Not only will the foliage of these trees block the sun, but their roots will compete for water and nutrients. Generally, tree roots takd food from the soil in a circle whose radius is the tree’s widest-reaching branches, and plants usually do poorly within this area.
- Keep your garden out of depressions where standing water collects and away from downspouts where the force from a sudden rain can wash out your plants.
How to Design Your Small Space Intensive Garden
The following are planning rules that will help you obtain maximum results.
- Plant tall vegetables on the north end of your garden to avoid shading the smaller crops, and plant the other vegetables in descending order of size down toward the south end of the garden.
- Forget about planting in rows. In an intensive postage stamp garden you scatter the seeds, to use all the space in your garden, and then thin out the seedlings (the small plants) as they come up. If you set out seedlings rather than seeds, space them without concern for straight rows. The mature plants should just touch one another on all sides.
- If your plot is large–say 10 by 10 feet or even 8 by 8 feet–you can plant different types of vegetables in separate squares or rectangles. In plots more than 5 or 6 feet wide, you’ll need a pathway in order to reach all your plants. However, if the plot is narrow or small, simply block out irregular groups of vegetables and fill in the spaces any way you wish.
- For root vegetables (such as carrots and beets), leafy vegetables (such as lettuce and spinach), and corn you need a special plan. The areas chosen for each of these vegetables should be subdivided into thirds or fourths, and each subsection should be seeded or planted a week to ten days apart. In this way you get continual harvests–as one subsection stops bearing mature vegetables, another begins. This is not so with, for example, tomatoes and cucumbers, which bear from the same plant over a long period of time. After you’ve harvested a subsection of leafy or root vegetables, you can replant that subsection. This way your garden will produce everywhere all the time.
- Use the air space above your garden as much as possible. That is, train tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vines and trailing plants to grow up trellises, fences, or poles, so that they won’t run all over your garden bed, crowding out the other plants. The better you get at vertical growing, the more things you’ll be able to pack into your intensive postage stamp garden.
- Don’t limit yourself necessarily to vegetables. Flowers and herbs will give you fragrance and color. Veteran gardeners know herbs and some flowers have a tremendous beneficial effect on garden health. You can even plant edible flowers, such as nasturtiums.
 9 x 9 bedÂ
10 x 7 intensive bed
Consider Raised Beds
There is something that sparks the imagination with these beds. They’re neat, clean, and easy to handle. You can walk all the way around them, you can thin the plants without getting dirty, and you can have as many as you want in any arrangement you like. If you’re handy with building things all you have to do is measure out the size you want, such as 4-by-4-foot space, prepare the soil, then frame the space with 2-by-4 inch planks and nail the corners together. If you prefer something that is easy to construct and looks great, check into pre-made raised beds. These are all-in-one complete kits with easy to assemble instructions. There are a number of sizes to choose from at EarthEasy.com.
4 x 4 raised bed – Photo courtesy of Earth Easy
8 x 8 raised bed  – Photo courtesy Earth Easy
Naturalyard beds – Photo courtesy of Earth Easy
Getting Your Soil Ready
For any size garden bed you choose I highly recommend buying a rototiller. In subsequent years the soil will be loose, and you can spade it up if you like. In any case, here is the procedure:
- Rototill your bed at least 1 foot deep.
- If you have clay soil, use a spade or spading fork to turn sand and compost into the soil until your bed consists of 1/3 compost, 1/3 sand, and 1/3 original soil.
For sandy soils, turn compost into your bed until you have 1/3 to ½ compost, the rest original soil. For in-between soils, just estimate how much you’ll need of one thing or another in order to end up with a mixture that contains at least 1/3 compost that is loose and fairly fine and that has good air space and is easy to work. You can purchase sand from most building supply or garden centers.
- Â Level the bed with a rake.
- Spread a 2-inch layer of rotted manure (or compost) over the entire bed. Add blood meal (4 pounds per 50 square feet), and a small dose of wood ash (e pounds per 50 square feet).  Using a rake, turn this into the top portion of the soil, and rake the topsoil to a light texture.Â
Most garden centers sell an organic fertilizer that contains these ingredients, making the job easier. Just buy this fertilizer and spread it in your garden.Â
How Far Apart to Set Plants
           When planting vegetables in an intensive postage stamp garden, space the plants a little closer than generally recommended on seed packets or on instructions for seedlings. Corn, for instance, does quite well planted 8 inches apart as opposed to the 12 inches usually recommended for conventional gardens.
Intensive Plant Spacing in Inches
Vegetable                 Spacing                                 Vegetable                 Spacing
Asparagus                  12                                           Leeks                          3
Bean, fava                   4                                           Lettuce, head             10
Bean, lima (pole)        10                                           Lettuce, leaf                6
Bean, lima (bush)        8                                          Muskmelon                 12
Bean, snap (pole)        6                                           Okra                           16
Bean, snap (bush)       4                                           Onions, bunching        2
Beets                           3                                           Onions                        3-4
Broccoli                      15                                           Parsnip                        4
Brussels sprouts        15                                           Peas                           2-3
Cabbage, Chinese     10                                           Peppers                      12-24
Cabbage                    14                                           Potatoes                     4-10
Carrot                          2                                           Pumpkins                   12-18
Cauliflower                 15                                           Radishes                     2
Celeriac                       8                                           Rutabaga                    6
Celery                          6                                           Shallot                         2
Collards                      12                                           Spinach, New Zealand 10
Corn                            8                                           Spinach                       4
Cucumbers                  6                                           Squash, summer        12
Eggplant                     24                                           Squash, winter           12-24
Garlic                           3                                           Swiss chard                 6
Kale                             8                                           Tomatoes                   18
Kohlrabi                       6                                           Turnips                        3
                                                                                   Watermelon                12-18
It isn’t necessary to buy compact plants for small space gardens, unless you want to. Normal varieties grow just fine. However, if you want to grow melons of any kind try using space-saving varieties.
For a complete list of vegetable varieties visit:Â www.postagestampvegetablegardening.com
Have fun with designing your garden beds. Â Experiment!
© Copyright 2013 by Karen Newcomb      Â
