Have you ever been frustrated with lack of gardening space? Have you tried to find ways to utilize space? Here are a few suggestions that I have tested.

1. Try a raised bed. A raised bed is a box filled with soil that can be used to save a lot of space. Raised beds have many pros, in that they incubate, and keep the soil warm, they require only a little bit of soil, and raised beds can house many different types of plants. I use a raised bed for most of my lettuces and vegetables, and am pleased with the amount of plants that can be grown. The trick about growing in raised beds, is to compact the plants and closely together as possible.

2. If you have a very small amount of space to grow, you may want to try growing a very compacted mixture of plants, which I sometimes call a salad garden. You may only have a five foot by five foot square plot of soil, buy you can utilize this very efficiently. What you do is, you loosen the soil in an area, and you plant as much in that area as possible. For example, you could plant lettuce, carrots, radishes, and even cabbage all in the same area. Again, the trick is compacting everything together. I recommend planting radishes along the outside, to protect against the garden against small pests.

3. My favorite technique for utilizing space is growing in wide rows. Some people grow in very thin, widely spaced rows, but I strongly disagree with this. Not only does that waste space, but it limits the different types of plants that can be grown. If you have the space, I highly recommend wide rows. With wide rows, you can compact the plants grown inside them. Not only do wide rows utilize space, but they allow a greater variety of plants to be grown in them. Between the rows, I would recommend about a foot of space. Another reason I like wide, compacted rows, is that they are so easy to weed. Very few weeds can even grow if the rows are compacted enough.

All in all, there are absolutely ways to utilize small space, and grow as much as possible. So don't get frustrated, just try some of these techniques; they do work, and gardening can be fun.

Learn more about this author, Andrew Baker.
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