Three Simple Steps for Planting a Chaos Garden
Work less, harvest more. What’s not to like?
Most gardeners accumulate a cornucopia of partially used seed packets. After all, who’s going to plant 500 lettuce seeds? After a few years, the germination rate drops significantly after the expiration date and you end up buying new packets. A “chaos garden” is the lazy person’s way to use up those old seeds that may or may not still be viable.
The basic idea: Mix the seeds in a bowl, scatter in loose soil and then sit back and see what happens. Here are a few tips to maximize your success. You might find that you end up with far more produce for the effort invested than if you took the time to form perfect beds and plant everything in tidy rows.
Step 1: Prepare the planting area
The point here is to be lazy, so don’t wear yourself out digging up every last weed and forking in tons of compost. If some seeds don’t like the growing conditions, that’s fine. As long as you start with soil that’s somewhat loose and bare on the surface, some will sprout and take root. Consider it a game of survival of the fittest.
Step 2: Sort and plant
You’ll have better luck if you plant the larger seeds (corn, beans, squash, melons) first. Scatter them on the surface and cover them with half an inch of soil. Scatter the smaller seeds (greens, tomatoes, peppers, root crops) on top of that and cover with another quarter inch of soil. Running a rake back and forth through the soil after each layer will help distribute the seeds evenly. Don’t hesitate to add flower seeds to the mix.
Step 3: Play Mother Nature’s helper
Regular watering will ensure optimal germination. Alternatively, take your chances with the rain and see what happens. If Mother Nature cooperates, you’ll soon have a tiny jungle of seedlings. Thin out some of the baby greens for salads (seedlings of beets, radishes and most other root crops are also edible), spacing them out enough to allow the rest to mature to full head size. Taller crops, such as tomatoes and cucumbers, can be trellised up, leaving smaller crops to grow at their base.
Or, you can let everything sprawl in a self-sorting tangle. You may be surprised at how well some crops share space. Many of the smaller, less vigorous plants will get crowded out as the season progresses, but that’s OK — the point of a chaos garden is to labor as little as possible for maximum harvest.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Three Simple Steps for Planting a Chaos Garden
by Brian Barth, Modern Farmer
May 9, 2019
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
I’ve used this idea for my garden. If there are areas that are barren and need a little color. I toss the seeds there and see what happens. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one that does this with extra seeds.
I just love this idea and plan to dedicate one part of my garden to trial it.
I do this with ornamentals all the time but never thought about it for edibles. Makes sense, and anyone who remembers Robert Rodale writing about ‘Regeneration Gardening’ will recall this is along the lines of what he was talking about. The only warning would be that this assumes the gardener knows how to identify/recognize seedlings and, sadly, a lot of people have neglected this.
It’s nice to know there are others using this method. In my garden is center stage and my neighbors love it.