by Lee Reich   

The traditional vegetable garden is a one-dimensional affair, with rows of individual vegetables separated by plenty of bare ground. That layout worked fine when most backyards measured in acres rather than square feet.

Today’s vegetable gardens are smaller than those of yesteryear but can give us a lot more bang for the buck in terms of space used and energy expended. We can reap more from less space by “thinking outside of the box” and beyond, with multidimensional vegetable gardening.

Dimension #2

A second dimension is added to a garden when it is planted in beds rather than individual rows. Those wide spaces between rows in traditional plantings were not for plants, but to allow room for walking while planting, weeding, hoeing, or tilling. The permanent beds of my vegetable garden are each 36 inches wide, allowing easy reach into them from the 18-inch-wide paths. 

Within a bed, plants can be grown close enough together so that their leaves eventually touch. Up a bed I might plant two rows of cabbage, three rows of lettuce, or five rows of carrots or onions. I plant onions four inches apart in the row and reap over fifty pounds of three- to four- inch-diameter orbs from a mere 10-foot-long bed!

Dimension #3

“Grow up” is what I tell some of the vegetables, and when they do, a third dimension is added to the growing space. Grown on a trellis or stake, peas, cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, and other vining plants can be planted closer together to yield more food per square foot of planted ground. As added benefits, staked vegetables get better air flow, which prevents disease, and stay more free of dirt and of nibbles from slugs and other ground-dwelling creatures. 

Some trailing plants reach out for support while others are more ambivalent. Stems of twining plants, such as pole beans, or of plants with tendrils, such as peas and cucumbers, flounder about looking for some support; once they find it, they naturally pull themselves up. Not so for tomato vines. With long stems but no means for clinging, tomato plants are as happy to crawl over the ground as to climb a stake, so they need to be tied or otherwise helped up. 

Dimension #4

The fourth dimension in my garden is time. One way to make use of time is to commingle vegetables with different maturities together in a bed. Interplanting a bed of broccoli and lettuce plants provides a good example. Two lettuce plants spaced eight inches apart can live between broccoli plants spaced two feet apart. The lettuce is harvested and out of the way by the time the broccoli finally fills the bed.

No need to restrict interplanting to just two different vegetables at a time. Run a long row of spring radishes up the center of that same bed of broccoli and lettuce (or just squeeze it in short rows here and there) for three interplants. The radishes are harvested and out of the way before the lettuces fill in, and the lettuces are out of the way before the broccolis fill in.

Few vegetables are in the ground from the very beginning to the very end of the growing season, so time can also be used to slip two, even three, different vegetables into the same piece of ground in succession in one season. For instance, tomato plants cannot go into the ground until the weather warms, so why not plant and harvest a crop of spinach, which thrives in cool weather, ahead of the tomatoes? Bush beans that peter out by midsummer can be followed by cabbage.

Dimension #5

And now for the fifth dimension: Putting time where it is not, tricks meant to add days or weeks to the beginning and/or end of the growing season. Pre-sprouting seeds in moist paper towels lets the ground outdoors warm or be used for a few extra days until the seeds sprout. Making use of transplants is another way to cheat time. Lettuce is a good example of a vegetable that can yield abundantly this way. Sown in containers from midsummer on, lettuces can be transplanted wherever space becomes available, such as where spent bush beans or corn plants have been cleared away, or onions harvested. Cabbage, broccoli, endive, and Chinese cabbage take longer to mature than lettuce, but transplants can similarly be slipped into the garden at the beginning or end of the season. 

Another way to add days or weeks to the growing season is to hasten warming of the soil in spring. Dry soil warms up faster than wet soil, making raised beds, with their good drainage and increased exposure, ready for planting earlier in spring. Pulling back any mulch, which insulates the ground, also hastens soil warming. Mounding the soil into south-facing ridges likewise speeds warming, in this case by capturing the sun’s rays more squarely.

Warming the air is another way to make time where it was not. The traditional glass bell jars—cloches—have been superseded by plastic bell jars, water-filled tubes (Walls o’ Water), fiberglass A-frames, floating row covers, and plastic tunnels held aloft by a series of metal or plastic hoops anchored in place with their ends poked into the soil. All these methods add weeks to the growing season.

Trying to fill every available niche of physical space and time in the vegetable garden is like doing a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. “Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think of them,” wrote Charles Lamb 200 years ago. I do think of them. But if frustrated trying to integrate every “puzzle” piece into every square inch of garden, I just go ahead and plant.

Lee Reich, PhD (leereich.com) is a garden and orchard consultant; he hosts workshops at his New Paltz farmden, which is a test site for innovative techniques in soil care, pruning, and growing fruits and vegetables.