Why Use Four-Foot-Wide Beds?

About 1980 I started reading Organic Gardening Magazines and Rodale Press books.  They were often discussing soil compaction in vegetable gardens.  In one of their writings they had a cut away photo of the root systems of two corn plants.  The roots went everywhere except they stopped dead next to the path.  I wish I still had that picture.  I converted my garden over to beds that year.  I have that picture of my first beds. (TOG and his sister) The corn spacing was pretty crazy.

Two years later I already had bricks in the paths.

At that time a local gardening columnist (not Brian Minter) advised in order to keep cabbage family transplants from falling over you must use your heel to firm them into the soil.  He was dead wrong.  He was actually restricting the root anchoring systems by compacting the soil.  In a bed, the robust and far spreading root systems of the cabbage family keep themselves from falling over.  Only a temporary X of two small sticks is all the support that a young cabbage transplant needs to weather the wind while it sends out a great network of roots to physically support itself.

Other advantages of beds --- I found my carrots were much easier to lift out.  There was no more digging around them.  I just grabbed their tops at the base with thumb and forefinger and lifted them out.  The same method worked with most weed pulling.  The only weeds that were hard to pull were the ones in the compacted paths.  Potatoes no longer needed to be dug up with a foot pushing down on a spading fork.  In the fall cleanup, the root systems of most remaining vegetable plants were very extensive.

So why four-foot-wide beds?

If you squat or kneel on the path and reach out sideways, most people can comfortably reach 24 inches.  That is what determines how wide to make a bed.  Therefore my beds are 48 inches wide and my paths are 18 inches wide. That equals 27% path and 73% growing space.  If a bed is less than 4 feet wide the number of paths needed per square foot of usable garden space increases.  In most backyards space is a restricting factor --- more paths less garden.

In unrestricted spaces, people tend to imitate agriculture and grow all vegetables in long rows with paths between each row.  And that was all because of Jethro Tull 
 No not the British rock group from the sixties (great flute), the earlier Jethro Tull. 
 

From Wikipedia:  “Jethro Tull – (agriculturist) was an English agricultural pioneer from Berkshire who helped bring about the British Agricultural Revolution.  He perfected a horse-drawn seed drill in 1700 that economically sowed the seeds in neat rows, and he later developed a horse-drawn hoe.  Tull’s methods were adopted by many great landowners and helped to provide the basis for modern agriculture.”

But backyard gardens aren’t agriculture.  They’re horticulture.

My son The Organic Grower (TOG) doesn’t imitate agriculture either.  His acre and a half under cultivation is in 30 inch beds with 12 inch paths. (72% growing area) His bed size is based on the width of his larger rear-tine tiller.  And he doesn’t step in his beds.  Like me he also walks beside his tiller on the paths.

With beds the fertilizer and soil amendments only go where the plants are growing and the watering when using a wand is only on the beds.  Weeding is easier when the crops are young and once the crops are fully established their optimum, tighter spacing shades out new weeds.  Poling and trellising are accomplished across the beds or in blocks and wind pollinators such as corn are more successfully pollinated when grown in blocks rather than long single rows.

As for wooden sides on ‘raised’ beds --- that’s nice.  But costly.  Is the wood treated with some ‘perfectly safe’ toxic waste? What do you fill the wooden beds with?  Usually something strange and imported like “Garden Mix”.  Take a magnifying glass to that and you’ll see mostly sawdust and sand.  Within a year or two that non decomposed carbon will suck most nitrogen away from the plants.  Why not use the topsoil that the land came with and build that legacy up with time?

Technically my beds are raised beds.  They are certainly higher than my paths.  I step on my paths and the beds stay high and raised.  Once I had a friend come over and he unknowingly stepped in a bed.  His size 13 shoe sank deep into the soil.  And that bed hadn’t been tilled for two months.

I use beds exclusively for the most productive use of my space.  And I don’t step in the beds. 

Happy gardening.