I waste a lot of time trying to make my garden pretty, but at my age I get more excited looking at a pretty garden than I do looking at a pretty woman.

I have my hoe handle marked off with measurements.

I save my scrap wood to make marking stakes.

I cut measuring sticks out of scrap wood, I also have my bulb planter marked off for seed spacing.

I keep binder twine hanging in the garden to tie up sagging plants. The binder twine is also used to mark a straight row.

I keep the tools I use often hanging in the garden so if I walk by and see something I dont like I fix it then.

Like I said above I waste my time because you cant eat PRETTY, but it makes gardening more fun for me.

Larry

I just plant seeds freehand, some too thickly sometimes--carots, radishes, beets especially. I have a "strawberry planter" and right now is when I really wish I knew how to post pics, because this is the handiest tool in my bag. It is made with a 5&1/2" piece of 1&1/4" metal round pipe welded at right angles to a 10" piece of leaf spring from an old car. It is not only the handiest thing ever for putting transplants in the ground, but I use it to measure the distance between those plants, 20" for broccoli and cabbage, 30" for peppeps and tomatoes.

The row spacing is dictated by the way we laid the garden out years ago. The 4 sections of the garden are 50ft long--to accomadate a soaker hose--and 20 ft wide. There are four four-foot beds in each section with three 1&1/3 ft paths between each bed. One soaker hose goes into the middle of each bed. The beds get either two or three rows lengthwise depending on planting time and size of crop.

I try to plant most seeds thinly enough that I don't have to do much thinning. For the small seeds I mix them with sand so they don't go down too thick, but there is always some to do anyway. We eat an awful lot of small veggie plants in the spring. I put radish, spinach and carrot leaf thinnings into salad, for instance as well as arugula, cilantro and dill which self seed too thickly.

Other than that I don't make a lot of effort to keep things well organized because something is always volunteering and I often leave it. That's why there are always petunia, celosia and zinnia plants in the corn patch and dill in with the potatoes.

Chandra,

I suppose spacing is important, but I don't know that I'd say it is critical. I have experimented with various types of spacing over the years and don't think that one type of spacing is necesarily better than another.

There are so many variables involved in figuring out what spacing works best for you in your location, with your soil, your moisture and your sunlight. You can plant closer than the "recommended" spacing if you have richer, more fertile or more highly-amended soil. You can plant closer than the recommended spacing if you have good rainfall or irrigation, at least up to a point. You can plant closer together (up to a point) if your garden gets full sun all day long but may need wider spacing if your plants will have partial shade and may have trouble getting more than 5 or 6 hours of direct sun. You'll need wider spacing if rainfall is not occurring during a drought period and especially if your city has implemented a water rationing program that restricts have often you can water.

You can plant according to the principles of Square Foot Gardening, using in many cases much closer spacing than what is recommended for conventional gardening and even though you'll get a slightly lower yield per plant, you'll have more plants because of the closer spacing, so you may get a higher overall yield. To plant that closely together you do need very well-amended soil.

I don't think there is one optimum spacing for each vegetable because within each vegtable category there are plants of many sizes. For example. I plant small dwarf tomato types like Red Robin, Yellow Canary and Orange Pixie a foot apart in a raised bed, plant a taller dwarf like New Big Dwarf two feet apart in a raised bed, plant a standard indeterminate like Momotaro or Brandy Boy three feet apart and plant monster plants like Tess's Land Race Currant 4' to 6' apart for best yield. So, if you ask me how far apart to plant tomatoes, do I tell you 1 foot or 3 feet or 5 feet apart or what?

It is the same way with corn. You have to know if you have a corn variety like Early Sunglow where the plants stay pretty small (4' to 5' tall) and produce 5-7" ears 2 months after planting or if you have a corn variety like Texas Honey June that will get 7' or 8' tall and produce ears 9" long 3 months or longer after planting. If you're planting pumpkins, are you planting a compact, bush-type like Cheyenne or a vining roaming and rambling type like Seminole? It matters.

It is always hard for me to tell anyone how to space anything if I don't know what specific variety they're planting and what kind of soil they have. In very rich soil and with good moisture you can plant much more closely, but in less fertile soil or during periods of drought, you must plant the individual plants or seeds further apart since moisture will be rare.

Clearly you intend to take a very precise, engineered approach to gardening and I will be no help to you whatsoever in this area because I take a totally opposite approach.

I don't take a ruler or a yardstick out to the garden to precisely space my plantings. I don't even attempt straight rows (this drives my retired farmer neighbors insane) because I don't need them. Straight rows are important, perhaps, if you want to drive a tractor down a wide space in between rows to cultivate soil, but that's not how I garden. My goal in every bed is to use every square inch to the extent that I can. So, once I put in the main crop, I will mulch the space in between the plants, but I'll also squeeze in early plantings of other crops. For example, in between tomato plants I'll have carrots and lettuce, or I'll have radishes interspersed with carrots. I'll also have herbs and flowers scattered all over. The herbs and flowers attract butterflies, bees and many kinds of beneficial insects. They also make the garden look pretty. My ultimate goal is that all the plants grow together in a living carpet of plant material so that you cannot see the soil or mulch underneath. The living carpet of plants shades the soil and keeps it more cool and more moist in hot weather, and it is harder for weed seeds to sprout in shade than in full sun.

I learned long ago that any time you have bare soil available, something is going to germinate and grow in that space. So, I like to plant what I want there in the bare soil instead of waiting for seeds to sprout and weeds to grow in the bare soil (or mulched soil) between plants.

Like Dorothy, I often have plant volunteers and not only do I like to leave them wherever they pop up, I'll also dig them up and move them where I want them if I have a lot of them popping up.

My beds are laid out to slow down water run-off and erosion because my whole garden slopes from west to east and from south to north, so it isn't laid out in any sort of neat, orderly grid or pattern. Someone who was looking at it and who did not understand how the water drains down from higher land next door to us during periods of heavy rainfall would think a crazy person laid out the garden, but it works to slow down the run-off and minimize erosion. It also fits in with my decision that my garden is going to look like a garden with beds full of whatever I like and whatever I enjoy growing in a wild profusion that resembles nothing so much as a jungle. When I was a kid, my dad, grandfather, uncles and aunts, and neighbors who gardened always had those little picture-perfect gardens with neat, orderly, precisely-spaced rows of crops and with wide paths between the narrow rows of crops. My garden is the total opposite of that, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

In some of John Jeavons' earlier editions of his book, "How To Grow More Vegetables....etc.", he had all kinds of spacing templates that you could make to help you follow his precision planting patterns, but I never made or used any of them.

One of the most successful gardeners I ever met here, and she no longer lives here, would rototill up the ground every year, plant her plants, and never give the plants any care other than occasionally watering them. She was what I'd call a minimalist gardener. She didn't mulch, didn't fertilize, didn't weed, didn't spray for any disease or insect. She just planted, watered and harvested. If the grasses the came up between her plants got too tall, she mowed or weedeated them. Guess what? Her garden yielded just as much per square foot as her dad's garden with its perfectly straight, precisely planted and mostly weed-free garden. It drove him nuts. Her garden did what she wanted it to do though...it gave her tomatoes and peppers and peas and whatever else she wanted to grow without taking over her life (she was a busy, single mom with several children and not much spare time for gardening).

There are many ways to garden and you just have to play around with it and figure out what works best for you. Many of us probably give our gardens too much time and attention, certainly far more than they "need", but we do it because we enjoy it so much. Many, many new gardeners can create their own problems by "loving their plants to death" by giving them too much fertilizer and too much water. I lean in the opposite direction and keep my plants slightly on the dry side and slightly hungry because they give me better production that way.

Having a garden is a big adventure, and the adventure can be different every year. That's part of what keeps it fun.

Dawn

Chandra,

The best method I have found for straight lines uses a yard stick and a cut-up tape from a broken measuring tape. My beds are 4 ft wide. The tape is cut into convenient lengths (say 4 or 8 ft). One lenght of tape is laid on each side of a bed. The edge of the yard stick or meter stick is used to mark lines at the appropriate spacing. This is done by dragging the thin edge in the dirt from one side of the bed to the other using the cut up measure tape for reference at each side. The line in the dirt should be just deep enough to see, so that seeds needing light won't be covered to deeply. This can be repeated at 90 degrees to the first lines. Then the seeds are planted at the intersections of the lines at the appropiate depths. Leave the seeds uncovered until a section is completely done, otherwise you can get confused about what has been planted and double plant. Interplanting can easily be done, because the seeds stay visible until you are done. If plants are already in place, I usually just eye-ball the spacing. This method works well for empty beds. There may be better or easier methods, but this works for me.

I'm an anal twerp who takes a tape measure into the garden with me to lay out my rows and paths. I've switched to mostly wide rows so that does make it easier than the gazillions of single rows I started with way back in the dark ages. Once I get the rows and paths laid out, I use body parts and gardening tools (markiing hoe and rake handles like Larry mentioned above) for spacing within those rows. They're precisely spaced but I don't continue to look like an obsessive dork for the entire planting season.

Like Dawn, though, I fiddle with the spacings depending upon the what varieties I'm planting, where I'm planting them, and what I think the year will end up like, weather-wise and energy/time-wise (for me).

I got distracted by herding kids in the middle of this post and have no lost my train of thought. Whoosh! There it goes...

Anyway, I get all persnickety with measuring and spacings for a lot of it but, other random times, I throw caution to the wind and go all willy nilly. A little ride on the wild side!

Diane

i measure my row spacing because i have a tiller and i Till between my rows to fight the Crabgrass.. so i can pull it out and put it into a bag and get it far from my garden.. i only till once the plants are more mature.. ex- corn 2 ft high ect. and since it is a powerful tiller i found the hard way that the rows must be wide enough.. LOL

I to thickly planted crops last year which put me on my knees for hours thinning.. so my husband bought me an earthway planter for my birthday.

I tend to have an go big and overdo it brain so this was a good gift for me. and is allowing me to expand my garden 50 ft wider this year and not waste as much money on seeds.

I am obsessive about straight rows because of the tiller.

this year the potatoes will have their OWN SECTION on one side of the garden because my dream of not walking on them last year was trampled by small children excited about tomatoes! and cukes.

only things in life that i want to be pretty... garden and my horse tack. its an illness that my husband hates about Summer version of me. LOL

If I had a big enough area I think it would be fun to take a handful of random seeds and just toss em out and see what happens. Sort of a tossed salad so to speak, LOL.
I do however prefer things to be nice and organized.

mike

I am obsessive compulsive and anal. I use a measuring stick to measure between beds and organize my square foot beds with wooden molding made into grids and screwed to the beds.

But I also alphabetize my dvds and my cans of soup and beans...

My seeds were driving me bananas...in a drawer in my fridge...until I hit upon a wonderful system. Now, my seeds are in a large zippered 3 ring binder with 4 pocket plastic sheets, divided by type and then alphabetized. I have organizing ISSUES.

I NEED my garden to look pretty or I won't want to work in it. If I had to choose between food production or looking nice, I'd be upset. I want both.

Jo

Here is my first planting grid built using PVC pipes and nylon thread (total cost $5). I call it "SPACE MASTER".

I have spaced lines 4" apart, that adds 36 squires in 2 sqft. I can use this grid to plant at various spacings;

1. very large plants @ 24" = 1 plant (tomato)
2. large plants @ 12" = 4 plants (cabbage)
3. medium plants @ 8" = 18 plants (bush beans)
4. small plants @ 4" = 36 plants (onions)
5. very small @ 2" = 144 plants (carrots)

Cheers -Chandra

OMG! I just could not be that exacting because I don't enjoy that kind of gardening. It has to be fun and exciting and measurements don't fall into the category of "fun and exciting" to me.

The last several years (10 to be exacting) of my working career, I worked for attorneys in the Tax and Estate Division of our law office. They did not only have JDs, but were also CPAs and had their Masters in Tax. Talk about anal will you? I recall one time it took 4 months to finalize a 2-page letter for one of my attorneys. I swore after that, life would be "fun" for me in my retirement and my garden certainly reflects that. Life is too short and too confining as it is. My willy nilly gardening lifestyle does not confine me to the house. I am out there every day enjoying the sights, sounds, smells. If I had to be precise about everything, I wouldn't feel like I was retired, but still at the office!

It's all personal preference and if math makes you happy, go for it. Are my plants "on center" in my pots - maybe, well, a little, hmmmm, probably not at all. But, they grow and they look beautiful to my not-very-discerning eye, and so far, the butterflies haven't sized them up for perfection, so I'm guessing they don't care at all. Neither do the bees, hummingbirds, insects, etc. And, I'm not directing the traffic, so........caution to the wind. I am a free gardening spirit. No boundaries, lines, borders, tape measures, strings, marked boards, rules, protractors, protractors? What evah! It's making me heady reading about all this perfection.......I need to kiss some dirt to ground me again....

Susan

I'm a bit late to the party on this thread, but here's my 2 cents.

If you are concerned about what your friends and neighbors think about what your garden looks like, or if it bugs you not to have it spaced just right, then yes you should put out the work to make everything straight and square to the world. Otherwise, do what suits your fancy and accomplishes what you want.

I don't have a lot of time (or desire) to get everything straight as possible. I eyeball it and go. Similar to Okiedawn, I do try to take advantage of the lay of the land to prevent erosion. I also try to orient things such that it makes watering as easy as possible.

I like the idea of sticking plants here and there in amongst other plants to maximize the use of space. I tend to leave a pretty good size area between rows to facilitate quick and easy access without damaging the crops. But in the rows themselves I've been know to stick multiple types of vegetables together. I have dill and poke and volunteer tomatoes and peppers which come up within the rows. All are welcome...until their not, and then they have to make way for the next crop.

Okieman

I space mine some what according to the "thin to" instruction listed on the back of the seed packet. I don't have a lot of space to optimizing the space I have is vital if I want to get out of my garden what I want. Now that I have a tiller I am going to be more careful with spacing, but I think I will still continue to "eyeball" it.

I love the "space master" I may do that!

To add to what Okieman said about sticking plants into rows here or there or allowing volunteers to stay where they sprout, I have found this is one way way to 'trick' insect pests or to at least make it harder for them to work their way down a row. If you have a row of broccoli all lined up in a row, the broccoli worms move from plant to plant with ease, but if you have a different veggie (one not from the cole family) here and there in that row, or an herb or a flower, it messes up their traveling around and slows them down. I use mixed plantings like that to thwart the bugs in their bid to destroy my plants.

Dawn

Chandra, how did you attach the string to the pvc? What kind of string did you use? This looks like a good rainy day project :)

I drilled holes to PVC pipe at regular interval (4") then threaded them with nylon construction line which you can buy at home depot or lowes'. It won't talemuch time, may be an hour from scratch to finish. -Chandra

Thanks Chandra! I'm guessing you tied the lines with knots big enough to not go throught that holes and that keeps the lines secure?

I am thinking continuous line, and holes drilled all the way through both sides of the PVC. I'm also thinking that I will likely never have beds that look as nice as Chandra's, Larry's and seedmama's.

As carol said, it has one continuous line with just two ties one at the beginning and one at the end. Carol, thanks, but our garden not yet reached the stage what I would like to see. I just worried about our Bermuda lawn this year, I not watered last summer and it has been trampled heavily since then. I hope it will surface and back to its original thicknesses. I see tons of lawn weeds this year, that much never seen before. -Chandra

Me too Chandra, when I mow the henbit, I may have bare soil under there. LOL

If henbit did not smell so bad I would try to eat it because it grows better than anything I have on the place.

This is a frustrating year, it seems that I don't have time to do anything properly.

I was in henbit hell all this weekend. It seems that is all I pull, weed and mow. I hate grass and lawns, I figure they are a waste of time, but these henbits are worse.

This is where I have a different perspective. If I was in town and likely had neighbors who expected a perfect lawn with no weeds, I might not care for henbit. As it is, I am in the country where it runs wild and I love it. I leave patches of it all over the property, mowing around them as long as it is in bloom, because the butterflies simply adore it. There is a patch of henbit about 18' long by 10' wide under a pecan tree and the air there is filled with butterflies from sunup to sunset. Often we will see swallowtails there weeks before we see them any place else. I don't let it grow in my veggie garden, though, because it surely would reseed and take over. I do have it growing just outside the garden fence.

It has been so hot here on a few days that our henbit is already starting to yellow and die back. The temps in the 80s this week likely will accelerate that process. It has been blooming since December though, so it probably has about run its course.

Larry, I know it is a frustrating gardening year for y'all. The year that we lost Tim's dad and my dad, I had a great garden and couldn't even take the time to harvest the peaches or pick the tomatoes. Sometimes real life just takes precedence and it looks like you are having one of those years. I hope you get to spend some more time in the garden so you won't feel like you're perpetually behind.

Chandra, My bermuda has made a great recovery, and already is greening up. I bet yours will too. Bermuda is really tough.

Ezzirah, I hate grass and lawns too. Every year I enlarge veggie and flower beds and remove a little more lawn. My goal is that by the time Tim retires, we won't have tons of lawn to mow. We'll always have the pastures though, so he can mow them to his heart's content if he wants (why do men think "bliss" is getting on the riding mower and cutting grass all day long???).

Having learned early in our years here that I never could dig all the bermuda out of the dense red clay, I've been focusing on planting enough trees and shrubs to shade it out, and now they finally are large enough that large portions of the bermuda are going away and will be replaced more and more every year with ground covers.

Dawn

I don't think it's possible to accidentally kill bermuda grass. Apparently even ripping it out of the ground and leaving the roots out in the sun all winter is not enough to kill it, because the grass I pulled last fall from the garden is actually rooting and coming back to life. I have a bad feeling that I'm going to be pulling it out of my beds all summer long. I should have paid more attention to those of you who said it's not enough just to till it under. :(

I actually like the henbit too, but unfortunately I'm in a subdivision where my neighbors have the weed-free lawn obsession and have been dropping not-so-subtle hints that I need to do some chemical warfare on my lawn. But, my husband and I don't want to pay to have it done and he actually thinks it's funny that we have the greenest lawn in the neighborhood right now, so we just ignore them. The one weed that I'd be willing to use herbicide on is the sandburs, though. HATE THEM.

I'm still very new to gardening, but so far my spacing technique is not very exact. I like the idea of planting things close enough together to shade out weeds, but it seems like I have to run a lot more drip line in order to reach everything. If they were in widely spaced rows I could just run one line down each row. It's a little more complicated when everything's planted in a random distribution.

Chandra,

I am so glad you posted the Spacemaster photo on this thread. Inspired by your photo last year, I built two, one with 4" spacing and one with 3" spacing. I've been intending to post a photo, and apparently missed when you bumped this thread in February. I agree they take about an hour a piece to build. I built both of mine during a two hour episode of Downton Abbey. Because my beds are 4' wide, I made my Spacemasters 4' by 2'. mrsfrodo, to get the holes lined up straight, I held each length of PVC under the lip of the kitchen counter, then ran a pencil line down the length. I then marked 4" down the length. Hubs just happened to have the drill press set up in the kitchen that day, but they could have easily been drilled with a plain drill.

Despite all the ribbing I take from Carol, I don't use tools like this so things will look nice. Good thing too, because my garden has never been a sight for sore eyes. To the contrary, and if I was doing it for looks, I'd be very disappointed. At the end of the day, I use tools like this so for the benefit of my family (more healthy food, more time together). By using the Spacemaster, I was able to plant over 1,000 onions in record time. Moreover, my 3 year old, could plant with me with no supervision because he knew exactly where to plant. When my planting goes fast, I get to spend more time with my family doing other things. Moreover, having tools like this allows me to plants things as close together as is advisable without overcrowding. Net result, healthy plants for maximum production in the limited space available. Proper spacing does not preclude interplanting.

Yesterday, My 4 year old helped me plant the popsicle sticks he had painted over the winter. We ran the 100' tape measure the length of the four foot wide beds. He was able to practice his pre-school patterns by placing one red, two greens, one red, two greens. Mom is coming this week to put my cabbage in the "greens". I won't need to leave my office-at-home job to show her where the plants go. When the tomatoes are ready to go in the ground, it will go quickly because everything is already laid out. If I don't have it laid out, I spend too much time trying to decide how to fit it all in. I really enjoyed the days when I could piddle around in the garden, but those days are gone for now. I've got to just get it done, and these toos really help.

Jo, I would LOVE to have a pretty garden like yours. If you get the itch really bad while you are sans garden, come on down. You can pretty mine up to your heart's content!

mrsfrodo, I planted my potatoes in an on-top-and-visible method much like you described. I laid out all the pieces, mostly to ensure they would fit in the space allotted, then drilled into the beds with a bulb auger and cordless drill. Much easier than fighting the loose soil that wants to fall back into the trenches.

Dawn, I'm so glad you mention the busy mom with the hands off garden, because that so largely represents where I am. I spend a lot more of my time volunteering for Scouts than I spend in my garden. The Cub Scout motto is "Do Your Best" (implying not anyone else's best, but yours.) I take that motto to heart, and while I enjoy seeing what others are doing in their gardens, I don't worry what others think about mine.

Seedpapa was inquiring about henbit yesterday, as it is something that doesn't grow where he grew up. He asked, "Is it a weed?" That facilitated a discussion about eye of the beholder. I happen to think it is very pretty, and is, in my mind, one of the great signs that Spring is arriving. I LOVE hiding Easter eggs in it. Alas, I am in a minority, and that doesn't bother me a bit. I made similar comment as Larry, in that if it was viewed as desirable, we'd all have such pretty lawns in spring. It's tough as nails.

Larry, don't despair. I haven't been able to do anything "properly" in more years than I can remember. I'm still standing and you and I can keep each other company.

I'm a henbit lover too especially in large solid swatches like are blooming in the orchard and woods now. But like Dawn I weed it out of the garden, along with the chickweed and deadnettle. I once thought about using weed and feed on the garden pathways to get rid of the winter annual weeds that pop up in between the fescue clumps, but DH reminded me that we mow that grass for the compost and to mulch with and he was concerned that the weed and feed would damage those applications. So no weed and feed for us. We just try to mow before they go to seed but we obviously missed it last year because they are up again this year.

I'm now officially "over" the henbit. It is popping up on the edge of the garden in the fenceline, and I was busy pulling it out today. We still have plenty of it in the wilder areas.

The "new" wildflower that is popping up literally everywhere this week is bloodroot. We always have just a few of them scattered here and there. This year, at the rate they are erupting from the ground, there's going to be as much bloodroot as henbit.