The Modern Farmer Guide to Small-Space Gardening
When space is limited, think twice about your planting plan.
In these days of “anything edible will sell,” you’ll often find small plastic planters filled with a medley of colorful and artfully arranged lettuce seedlings at garden centers and grocery stores. These planters are roughly the size of large salad bowls (and look very healthy and delicious), but even a half-hearted stab at logic reveals the utter rip-off they are. Usually priced between $10 and $20, they are unlikely to produce enough lettuce to fill a large salad bowl before the densely packed greens become overgrown and bitter. Why not spend your money at the farmers’ market and come home with a week’s worth of salad fixings instead?
These “salad bowl” planters are little more than a cute symbol of urban hipness, but they beg a few questions: If I have only one square foot of sunny real estate on my apartment windowsill, what edibles are actually worth planting? What if I have 10 square feet on a sunny balcony? A four-by-eight-foot plot on the roof of my building or in a community garden down the street? What do I plant to maximize my harvest?
One Square Foot
At window-box scale, there’s really only one reasonable option for producing a worthwhile harvest: herbs. You can easily stuff four or five of your favorite herbs into a tiny planter. And, because you’ll only be harvesting a pinch of this or a pinch of that at a time, you won’t have to kill the plants to enjoy them. Try one planter with a mix of annual herbs (such as basil, cilantro, dill and parsley) and one with longer-lasting perennials (such as sage, thyme, chives, rosemary, oregano and mint).
10 Square Feet
At this scale, there are a few options. Planted entirely in greens, a 10-square-foot plot could realistically produce a few salads a week. Alternatively, you could divide the space among three vegetable plants that are large and abundant enough to produce a meaningful harvest from a single specimen: tomato, zucchini and cucumber. Or go hog wild with berries and plant one blueberry bush and three canes each of blackberries and raspberries. It will take a couple of years before they start producing substantial crops, but eventually you’ll harvest at least a few pints of berries each week throughout the summer.
32 Square Feet
A standard four-by-eight-foot garden bed won’t feed your family, but it will afford you a range of growing options. One simple planting plan is to divide it into thirds — just right for the three 10-square-foot scenarios above, with space left over at one end for a selection of annual and perennial herbs. Alternatively, you could plant a themed garden, such as a salad garden, and plant a bit of everything you like to toss in a salad, from arugula and frisée lettuce to carrots and bell peppers. You could also focus on root crops, such as potatoes, radishes, beets and turnips, or fill it with edible vines, trellised beans, peas and cucumbers vertically, with winter squash snaking around them on the ground.
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].The Modern Farmer Guide to Small-Space Gardening
by Brian Barth, Modern Farmer
June 27, 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
You should have mentioned catch crops and succession sowing to make the most of your growing season. Having had a 32ft plot I can say that with careful planning you can produce a huge amount of food!
Potatoes would be a pretty terrible use of space in a 32 square foot garden. Probably the absolute last thing that should be planted there.
Limited space? Use Earthboxes. We grow tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, beans and carrots in them. They sit on our back patio.
I have a small corner lot in a 55+ community.
Cilantro and dill fare better in cool weather. Most of the other herbs listed do well in temperate climates.
Herb gardening is my specialty since I live in an apartment 🙂 all you need is a window and a window planter and you’re good to go! Heck even if you don’t have a window (I’d hate to imagine an apartment without windows…) there are ways you can grow herbs completely indoors.
Have you considered talking about in-home hydroponic systems? I found one called the AquaTree that can grow herbs and veggies in 4-10 days inside your home. It is honestly incredible how it works and it takes up almost no space at all! You can have an entire herb garden on your kitchen counter!