Seven Strategies for Making the Most Out of Your Small Garden

As the prices on groceries continue to rise, many people might be thinking of growing a vegetable garden for the first time. It can be a great idea, not just because groceries are expensive, but because getting to the store includes soft costs like gas, grocery bags, and time—to say nothing of how wildly empowering it can be to simply walk into your backyard and collect the food you grew yourself.

The key to your success here is maximizing the space you have, because gardening has soft costs, too. The fertilizer, water, and of course, your time. You’ve got a limited amount of space to work with, as well, so choosing the right crops to get the maximum amount of food is essential. 

Maximize the space by growing up and down

You might look at a raised bed and see a simple 4-by-8-foot space, but I see all the vertical space. Beneath the tomatoes lies space for radishes, turnips, and carrots. Peas, beans, and cucumbers grow straight up if supported by a trellis, using almost no square footage of the bed itself. If tomatoes are allowed to sprawl across the bed, they take up a lot of space, but pruned and trellised appropriately, they’ll grow up, leaving room for crops around them. Almost all squash can be trellised to grow upwards. 

"Cut and come again" crops make the best use of space

Grow lettuce, celery, chard, and kale because these crops allow you to take leaves or stalks from them without killing the plant—they'll simply grow back. Eventually, the plant will go to seed (it will send up a shoot that will flower, and then that flower will produce seeds, and this process will turn the vegetable bitter), these crops take little time to grow, so they can be quickly replaced. 

Avoid crops that take up a lot of space for little return

I only grow cabbage in wintertime—during the summer, I can’t spare the space. Each cabbage plant needs 3 square feet or more, and only produces one head of cabbage, which is cheap to buy at the market. The same is true for broccoli and cauliflower. A single zucchini plant will take over an entire bed, and while it will produce an endless amount of zucchini, it’s usually too much hassle. Corn doesn’t seem like it would require much space, but you need to grow it in blocks of 4 feet by 4 feet in order for it to pollinate. Corn is also such a heavy nitrogen feeder that it will rob all your nearby vegetables of the nitrogen they need to grow. 

Grow mini vegetables instead of full-size ones

I recently wrote about growing mini bell peppers instead of full size, since each full-size plant may produce only a few bell peppers, but a mini pepper plant may produce 50. The same is true of eggplants and tomatoes. Planting one cherry or plum tomato plant (I recommend Juliet) will give you a summers-worth of tomatoes to play with rather than waiting for a few full-size tomatoes to ripen. Small eggplants will also ripen over the season, giving you produce to harvest more often. 

Choose crops that are easy to grow

Some crops are more finicky than others. It’s hard to screw up lettuce, radishes, or peas, but a lot of things can go wrong before you successfully grow a watermelon or artichoke. Carrots are very hard to germinate, but beets grow for everyone.

Choose vegetables that grow quickly

Some vegetables are short crops, meaning they grow quickly, and some are long crops, taking five or six months. Brussels sprouts and parsnips, for instance, take six months to grow, but turnips can be harvested in 60 days. Lettuce, radishes, beets, scallions, spinach, chard, cucumber, green beans, and peas are all examples of short crops. The back of any seed packet (or the plant label on starts) will tell you how long any crop will take to harvest.

Stagger your planting

Gardens are not a “set it and forget it” project. You need to be constantly inputting (planting) and outputting (harvesting). To keep a small space consistently going, you’ll want to utilize succession planting. Instead of planting peas once, plant them every two weeks so there's always something to harvest. The same is true with almost every crop mentioned above: lettuce, scallions, radishes, beets, turnips, etc. Plant some in week one, and then again in week three, five, and seven. As you pull out older plants, newer plants are already growing. If a plant is struggling, pull it out and try something else—you don’t have the space to let anything linger.