Small-Space Gardening

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Don't let limited growing space stop you from creating a bountiful garden. Learn about this impressive urban garden in London at www.verticalveg.org.uk. PHOTO: VERTICALVEG/SARAH CUTTLE

My first experiment in small-space gardening was in Brussels, Belgium, on a rooftop with no guardrails. While my official goal was container-grown tomatoes, my unofficial one was to avoid becoming human gazpacho on the pavement five floors below. Now, 15 years later, I’m still practicing my small-scale growing skills, this time in the safety of a 10-by-10-foot plot in the suburbs of Maine. I’ve learned that no space is too small for growing food. Whether your garden consists of a window box in the city or an acre in the country, you can still benefit from applying the techniques of small-space gardening.

Soil Is No Small Matter

All successful gardening endeavors, big or small, start with fertile soil. If you have a large plot, you can get away with having less-fertile soil by planting more and spacing out your crops. In a small space, however, that approach simply doesn’t work. When I was preparing my front yard garden back in 2008, I remember sifting my sandy soil through my fingers and realizing I had to improve it. I added lots of organic compost along with a little lime and bone meal, and I add more organic matter each year.

The ideal soil type for growing most crops is loam, the rich halfway point between clay and sandy soils. If you’re not sure which soil type you have, hold some in the palm of your hand, wet it and try to make a ball. If it forms a tight, hard wad, then you have lots of clay in your soil. If you can’t form a ball, you have sand. If the ball forms but pretty easily breaks apart, you probably have loam. No matter which type you have, you can improve both your soil’s structure and fertility by working compost into the top layer each year. Those with really limited space can take heart in knowing there are effective composting options suitable for even the smallest of spaces (see “Micro-Composting,” near the end of this article).

Get Intense

Fertile soil that retains nutrients and water is one of the keys to success with “intensive planting,” which is a fancy way of saying planting a lot in a little area. America’s intensive-growing tradition has two fathers: John Jeavons and Mel Bartholomew. In his classic 1974 book, How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, Jeavons introduced Americans to French intensive-gardening techniques, notably deep soil preparation through double-dug beds and intensive crop-planting patterns. Seven years later, Bartholomew offered a new way to think about these patterns in a classic book of his own, Square Foot Gardening.