400 Square Foot Vegetable Garden Layout

Lots of things need to be considered when planning a garden. Not only do you need to have adequate soil, water, and sun, but you have to plant things in just the right place. Some plants need lots of sun, but if you live in a very hot climate they can’t handle afternoon sun. Some plants need shade, but filtered shade, not complete shade. Some plants are just buttheads and need to be isolated or they’ll take over (I’m talking about you, mint). If you buy indeterminate tomatoes or vining cucumbers then not only do you have to consider how you will support them as they climb, but you also have to place them in an area where they won’t grow up and shade nearby plants. Basically, it’s not a simple process. But fortunately, it’s not an impossible process either.

This is my first time doing honest-to-goodness, in-the-ground vegetable growing. I can grow some killer peppers and tomatoes in containers, and my herbs have done alright over the years. But I’ve never done a vegetable garden where the plants go straight in the ground. The side-effect of being a renter for so many years, I guess. So I have to plan this all out from the beginning. Time to pull out the stuff I learned in all those botany classes.

We started with a garden plan borrowed from the back of Small Plot High Yield Gardening called the 400-Square-Foot Soup Garden. This garden plan has a great selection of vegetables for cooking, like beets, beans, broccoli, potatoes, celery, carrots, onions, etc. Originally we were going to follow this plan almost to a T, until we spoke to Dax at Beets Workin’ Farm. He basically warned us against spending much time and energy trying to grow celery and carrots. Ok, so we scratched those two things off the list. We also wanted to swap spinach out for lettuce, since we eat a lot more lettuce, and decided to do more lettuce instead of peas. Did I mention we eat a lot of lettuce? We also swapped out sorrel and parsley for lots of hot peppers. The Handyman loves hot sauce, and makes a few types of his own, so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of hot peppers to use. So, basically we kept the layout of the rows along with the herb garden in the center of the path, but the varieties we planted are quite different so we had to reassess where to place everything.

Beets, which are a family favorite, do extremely well when planted next to bush beans and potatoes but far away from pole beans. Cucumbers like being next to cabbage and broccoli. Eggplant likes peppers. Peppers like tomatoes. Tomatoes like peppers, but shouldn’t be next to potatoes, because they both attract the same pests. And pretty much everything in the garden benefits from having marigolds around. Marigolds repel pests, and the chickens can eat the spent blossoms to enrich the color of their egg yolks.

So, after a lot of drawing, erasing, re-drawing, crumpling, muttering, and grumbling, I finally came up with a layout that will keep things apart that need to be apart, keep things near that like to be near, keep things east that grow quite tall, and protect things that are more sensitive. My lettuce is currently set to get strong afternoon sun, but I am planning on making shade cloth tents for those three rows, so hopefully I can still grow it there.

And then we planted everything! That was the best part. I love sinking my hands in the soil.

Lettuces

Freshly planted beans and beets

It was Mother’s Day this past weekend, and my kids knew exactly what to make for me. Garden markers! The Handyman cut them some pieces of wood, and my oldest daughter helped orchestrate a painting party for everyone to make some signs. I love homemade things, and I especially love mis-matchy things. If things look too neat and orderly I start to get a little claustrophobic. I like an eclectic look. These lovely signs are a perfect addition to our garden and a great visual representation of the unique personalities each of my kids have.

Peppers

 

In addition to the things we started from seed, we purchased the following seedlings from our local nursery:

• hot peppers
• bell peppers
• cucumbers
• zucchini
• eggplant
• purple cabbage
• lettuce
• mint
• chives

The reason we purchased some things instead of growing them was purely a financial decision. We knew we wanted a lot of variety in our hot peppers, so to buy 6-7 different seed packets only to grow 1-2 plants of each variety just doesn’t make sense. We also knew we only wanted one or two zucchini and eggplant plants. When seed packets are a few dollars a piece, and your local nursery sells seedlings at 50 cents a piece, the math isn’t difficult to do. I also ended up buying two purple cabbage seedlings on impulse, because I remembered how much I love the spicy addition to my salads. Finally, my mint and chive seeds never germinated. Still not sure why.

Sad mint and chives are sad

One thing I was trying to avoid, too, by buying some things and starting others, was having everything ready for harvest at the exact same time. The bush beans, for example, all ripen together. So if I plant 15 bean seedlings in my garden at the same time then I will have ten thousand beans at once. However, bean seeds only have about a 70% germination rate, and a germination period of about 10-14 days. So, I plant my seeds, two weeks later I plant more where the bald spots are, and now I have naturally staggered bean plants. Same with the lettuce. I bought green leaf lettuce that can be harvested in bits or the whole head. As it matures, I will take outer leaves from some of the heads, allowing the inner leaves to keep growing and growing, and some I will head completely. Then I will replace those heads with lettuce seeds and start the process over again. This will also keep us from getting bored by letting us swap out lettuce varieties throughout the season. Haha … letting us … let us … lettuce. (Ok, I’m getting giddy, time for bed).

Here it is! The finished garden! (Well, technically the potatoes weren’t planted at the time this picture was taken, but close enough!)

A few things we learned through the seed-starting process will hopefully help us next year. First of all, we believe we need an additional grow light in the basement. We didn’t have anything get leggy or lean, but we do feel like we could have had a better arrangement downstairs if we had more light. I also didn’t thin my seedlings. It made me quite nervous to decide which seedling was going to live and which would become chicken food, and I was worried I would pick the wrong one. Then I had this wacky idea that I could just separate the seedlings right before planting and have double the plants. Well, that was stupid and I know that now. I was only successful in separating one of my seedling sets. The rest ended up getting thinned out anyway, only the plants were bigger so I felt even worse. Next year I will thin! I promise!

Another thing that will hopefully be different next year is the starting time. We were starting from scratch this year, and we had to wait for the ground to thaw enough for us to work the soil before we could do anything. Even the silage tarp couldn’t go on until we were able to take off the first layer of grass. Next year we can put cold-tolerant plants out much earlier than we could this year, because the garden will be ready. Also, we can plant garlic this fall and have garlic in the garden next spring! Lots of things can be started earlier. The Handyman wants to build us a cold frame, too, so hopefully we can extend our growing season in both directions. I am going to spend this winter doing the research to figure out how best to get two harvests out of this garden next year.

 

Starting Seeds Inside

So last night the Handyman and I put our new DIY Soil Block Maker to the test.

My last frost date is in mid to late April, so I needed to get some seeds started indoors. According to Brett Markham, author of The Mini-Farming Bible, some spring seedlings can be started indoors as early as 12 weeks before the last frost. This is good for cold-hardy plants like broccoli. Some only need about two weeks inside before going outside, so obviously we aren’t starting those yet. Sorry, watermelon, you’ll have to wait.

Round One consists of the following plants: 

• broccoli
• cabbage
• celery
• yellow onions
• red onions
• chives
• tomatoes
• herbs
  • basil
  • mint
  • thyme
  • cilantro
  • oregano
  • parsley

I’ve mentioned before that I love the book Small- Plot, High-Yield Gardening. Well, this book has one of the best things for someone starting out: A complete garden plan for just about any size garden you could possibly want. There are a lot of things to consider when planning a garden. Did you know that some plants really don’t like to be neighbors? For example, planting onions near beans will actually stunt the growth of the beans (Burpee). And some plants provide protection for others, like garlic, which is pretty much your garden’s personal bodyguard. But honestly, the list of dos and don’ts is kind of overwhelming, especially for someone who is trying to flesh out other plans as well. I just want someone to give me a diagram of what I should plant and where I should plant it. Next year I’ll think about what I loved and what I hated and adjust accordingly. Well, that’s exactly what I found in the back of Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening.

The Handyman and I figure we are going to aim for a 20’x20′ garden. We have the space, and when we do something we don’t mess around. However, we reserve the right to scale it back if we find it too intense for Year One. We did make a couple of minor changes to the plants within the garden, but we are essentially following the layout for the 400-Square-Foot Soup Garden found on page 231. Once we’ve started all our seeds and made those final decisions I will post a diagram of exactly what we’re planting. I can promise one thing, though… it will contain a lot of hot peppers. The Handyman is capable of making hot sauce that will burn your eyebrows off if you get too close.

Just to give you an idea of scale, however, for just the plants we are starting in Round One of seed starting indoors we have to do 236 soil blocks! So, we got to test out our soil block maker and really get the technique honed in.

First of all, we are using coconut hulls as seed starting medium. If you’d like to know why, check out my post on the DIY Soil Block Maker. Burpee makes a lovely compressed brick of organic coconut hulls for just under $3, and it’s available at Home Depot. We bought several with our spare change. Basically, you take this brick, put it in a bucket, add water, wait for it to expand, and then form the hulls into whatever shape you want. It expands to 8 liters, and we found that we were able to get about 70-80 blocks from one brick. For our seed starting project all we used was the coconut hulls, a large bucket we got from a friend’s restaurant, a small bucket for spillover, water, some leftover trays we never used from a barbecue last summer, and the block maker. Now, in case anyone is wondering…. yes, this is my kitchen island. And no, I don’t recommend that anyone use their kitchen islands for this project. Ever. Learn from my fail. This was after making the five you see pictured. Imagine what my kitchen looked like after over 200!

Friends don’t let friends destroy their butcher block counter. For the love of gardening, please use a picnic table or at least put down a tablecloth.

Here is a short video demonstration of me using the soil block maker. I don’t have fancy camera equipment, but it should suffice.

Here are additional tips as well as the written tips for anyone who can’t access the video.

• The directions call for 4 1/2 quarts of water.  We found that 4 1/4 quarts was just perfect. Too much water and the medium is soggy, too little and the blocks don’t hold their shape. The key is to add 4 quarts of water, let the brick expand, mix it thoroughly, drizzle the remaining cup of water around and thoroughly mix again, breaking up any clumps.
• Hand fill the block maker with planting medium. Don’t pack it full. Imagine you’re filling a measuring cup with flour.
• When pressing down on the plunger, don’t smash the heck out of it. It doesn’t take your whole weight to compress, and you don’t want to make the soil too dense for early roots to penetrate.
• Don’t forget that when you pull up the PVC you don’t have any support on the block anymore, so stop pushing on the plunger before you pull up on the PVC.
• The plastic disk really needs to go past the bottom of the PVC, so if it’s indented then you need to adjust the location of the disk on the carriage bolt (see pic below)

 

Now that we have blocks made, we have to add the seeds. I added three seeds per block, and I will thin them out later, once I can identify the single seedling that is the strongest of the three. According to Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening, one of the biggest mistakes people make when starting seeds is burying them too deep or covering them too hard. They only need to be covered with a sprinkling of dirt equivalent to 3x the size of the seed. Look at the size of these mint seeds! They need a few crumbs of dirt on them, and that’s it.

Here is an example of a soil block that has been planted with onion seeds and one that has not. See how loose the soil is covering the seeds? We don’t want the plant to have to work too hard before it gets those first leaves up and starts photosynthesizing.

 

So, as I mentioned before in my shopping post, plants need growing medium, warmth, moisture, and light. Our seeds are going in the furnace room in my basement. It’s around 70-75 degrees in there. That’s perfect for new seeds. We put the blocks in repurposed trays that are water-tight, and we will mist them until the first leaves appear and then water from the bottom to help establish healthy roots. No spoiled plants here.

Now here’s the interesting thing I discovered. According to Brett Markham’s Mini-Farming Bible, fluorescent lights work just as well as growing lights when starting plants inside. Whaaaa? So you mean I don’t have to spend $20-30 for a fancy bulb? He swears that if you get a warm and a cool fluorescent light bulb and hang them very close to the seeds for 18 hours a day, then the plant will get the full spectrum of light necessary for healthy growth. You’ll know if it’s not enough because the seedlings will lean toward the light or grow tall and spindly reaching for more. So we got a couple of shop lights and some warm and cool fluorescent bulbs and the Handyman rigged us up a proper growing station in the furnace room.

And, spoiler alert… we started some seeds a couple of weeks ago because we were really impatient and wanted to try our soil block maker. And there they are in the back right corner! They’re doing great! No one is growing all leggy and stupid or leaning hard toward the light. Here’s a close up pic.

Aren’t the little broccolis and cabbages just precious??

I did learn a few lessons in this seed starting adventure. Firstly, I learned that the Handyman’s patience for working out the kinks of soil block making is positively correlated with the number of Yuenglings he’s had. Secondly, I learned that I should never let the Handyman do the seed labeling (might also be Yuengling-related).

And finally, I learned that the feeling of having all of this done is so much better than I thought it would be. It was weighing on my conscience, just knowing how close spring is getting (92 days as I’m writing this!) and how many things are still on our To Do list. It feels like every time I cross something off I add two new things. Having this done takes a lot of worry away.

The next goals are to get an Ask the Experts interview with a local farm and start the chicken coop plans. I’m still trying to decide between getting pullets or chicks. There are so many decisions!

UPDATED! See how my seeds are doing now!

DIY Compressed Soil Block Maker

One of the things you see a lot in the garden center of the hardware store are little “seed starting kits” that come with disks of expanding peat moss and little customized plastic trays. These are charming, and hold lots of promise for the imaginative beginning gardener, but there’s a reason why gardening books don’t write “Step One: Buy a billion pre-made peat moss seed starting kits.” The obvious reason is that they are expensive! Right now Amazon has a 50-plant starter kit made by Jiffy for just under $11. That’s $0.22 per seedling. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but to put it in perspective, the Handyman and I are starting a little under 300 seedlings inside just for Round One. That’s $66.00! For dirt! I just think that’s ridiculous. The kits are a great thing for children, or people who are starting one or two plants, but for anyone who is beginning a serious garden it just doesn’t make financial sense.

The less obvious reason, thanks in part to the creative photography and marketing departments that design the packaging, is that they actually make more work for you in that they are so small you will be forced to transplant the seedlings at least once before you can put them in the ground. I know the photos on the box show big healthy tomato plants, but those are not going to happen if you keep seedlings in a 1″ x 1″ peat disk.

Transplanting opens up the opportunity to damage delicate root structures. And where are you going to put the seedlings? Well, Jiffy conveniently also sells 3” peat pots for $22 per hundred. Ok, so now my cost is $0.44 per seedling, or $112 total, PLUS the cost of potting soil to fill the peat pots. I’m also out the time it takes to transplant 300 seedlings into peat pots. And don’t believe the line they try to feed you about the peat pots being planted directly in the soil and decomposing. When tilling my soil for my perennial garden last year I found peat pots, IN TACT, from my home’s previous owner. That makes them at least three years old.

Brett Markham, author of The Mini-Farming Bible, recommends using a soil-block method to plant seeds directly into a compressed block of seed starting medium that is large enough to get them all the way through to transplanting. You can buy pre-made blocks of this seed starting medium, or even buy soil block makers, but the Handyman is around, so why should I buy what he can make?

So, instead of spending $112 on dirt, we decided to make homemade soil blocks.

Now, seeds are pretty amazing. Contained within the seed are all the nutrients the plant needs for the first couple of weeks of life. There is no need to buy fertilized potting soil. In fact, delicate seedlings are more likely to be burned by the excess nutrients than they are to be helped. The seed provides the nutrients needed to germinate and push up the first set of leaves, known as cotyledons. Have you ever split a peanut in half? That little nub that you can see on one of the halves is the beginning of a set of cotyledons! Then, those primary leaves can convert light energy into chemical energy by performing photosynthesis, which provides another boost of energy. In fact, it isn’t for the first few weeks that seedlings even need additional nutrients. What they need is good light, a microbe and germ-free environment, and plenty of fluffy soil to let them establish strong roots.

For these reasons, we’ve decided to start our seeds in medium made from coconut hulls, and supplement with an organic fertilizer and compost after a few weeks. For just under $3 we were able to get a brick of organic seed-starting medium that made 36 of our homemade blocks. That’s $0.08 a piece with no need to transplant before they go directly in the ground! Time AND money saved!

A soil block maker is essentially a thingamajig that holds the coconut hulls in place with a plunger to press it into a compact shape. It is possible to buy a soil block maker for around $20-30, but given our decision to buy as little as possible, the Handyman figured he could make one using scraps from the workshop. He found a fantastic YouTube video from Homesteadonomics with directions on making a PVC pipe soil block maker and set to work.

(Now, please please please don’t take this list down to the hardware store and buy what you don’t have. If you have 6″ bolts, use those. Wrong size PVC pipe? Who cares? I won’t tell the plants if you don’t. Just use what you have laying around.)

Materials and Tools:

• 2″ PVC pipe scraps about 3′ long
• 2 1/4″ hole saw
• scrap 1×4 (3/4″ thickness) pressure treated lumber
• 8″ carriage bolts cut to size
• nut to fit the carriage bolt
• plastic (we used the lid of an old 5 gallon bucket)
• wood screws

From left to right: Two circles of wood cut from 3/4″ thick pressure treated lumber, carriage bolt, appropriate nut, plastic disk cut from old paint bucket lid, 6″ section of 2″ PVC pipe, drill, drywall screws, and a hole saw to cut the disks (this should be adjusted to fit tightly within the PVC, so if you get a different size pipe make sure you adjust the size of the hole saw).

Please check out my post on starting seeds inside to get a good look at this soil block maker in action. It really is brilliant in its simplicity. It forms perfect cylinders of seed starting medium, complete with a little indent in the top for the seeds to go.

Assembly is so easy. Just thread the bolt through both wood disks, use one wood disk to make a handle for the plunger and screw the other one into the top of the PVC pipe to act as a stop. The plastic disk gets attached to the bottom of the bolt with nuts so that it goes up and down with the plunger. The bottom bolt (identified in the picture on the right) is what makes the indent for the seeds.

We’re starting our seeds today, so check back in for updates later.