Backyard (organic) vegetable gardening in small spaces

Most backyard food gardeners are looking to augment their family’s diet with a variety of seasonal fruits, vegetables and herbs throughout the growing season.

The most common way to combine garden crops is via an age-old technique called interplanting, which in essence means planting various garden edibles with different growth and spacing attributes together in the same soil beds or rows.

Building on the idea of interplanting, gardeners combine plants that produce vines and can be grown on trellises or fences along with low-growing crops. So-called “vertical gardening” concentrates much more production into each square foot of planting area. Tomatoes, pole beans, cucumbers, snap peas, melons and winter squash are all examples of crops suitable for vertical gardening if staked or supported properly.

Another common technique is succession planting, which entails replacing a finished crop with a different one, or planting a single crop in small amounts over an extended period of time. Some crops particularly well-suited to succession planting include bush beans, lettuce, spinach and radishes, each of which have long growing seasons but can be harvested after only a few weeks. A related technique would be to plant both early- and late-maturing varieties of the same type of crop around the same time, and harvesting the resulting crops successively. Tomatoes and corn, for example, each come in varieties that ripen at different times during their respective growing seasons.