Tardissing the Space Part 3 – Dense Layered Planting

The Zone and Sector analysis was adamant – the only space I really have for annual garden beds is the east side front yard. The north side has great light, and we have made it into a berry arbour (more about that later), but it’s a narrow, concrete path. The south side has great accessibility, but it’s a narrow, very shady strip between house and lane. It’s useful for shade lovers (more of that later too), but annual beds need at least some direct sunlight. The backyard is shady too, and has to provide space for chooks, clothes line, trampoline, tricycle riding, soccer ball kicking and outdoor cooking – I can fit some fruit trees and perennials in around them but it’s another Zone 2. The verge is for communal stuff. Leaves the front yard.

So how to make 30m² grow enough vegetables for us, plus snow peas and carrots for the grandkids lunch boxes and the occasional excess for giveaways? Economically? I think the answer is to treat it like a jigsaw, or an art piece that has lots of elements that need to fit together.

The first piece, the keystone piece, is the same one I talked about in Part One – aim to harvest every scrap of sunlight – keep the soil completely shaded by growing things all the time. A very dense mixed planting with tall things to the south, short things to the north, so you create a tiered effect and everything gets to do enough photosynthesising.

So, for example, in the picture at the top, south is at the back, north is at the front. The broccolini at the rear is about 1.2 metres tall, and the trellis for climbers behind it is over 2 metres tall. The silver beet, carrots, lettuces, leeks, spinach and celery are all to the north of the broccolini. If they were on the south side, they would never get any direct sunlight. But to make a dense mixed planting like this work, it needs a lot of other bits to fit too.

You need rich soil and enough water to do this – you want to avoid soil quality or water becoming the limiting factor. So one of the puzzle pieces is figuring out ways to produce enough compost to feed such intensive planting – see the series about soil building. You need soil with enough organic matter to have good water retention and enough depth to be able to encourage roots to go deep and wide.

You also need to be planting seedlings out when they are well advanced so as to avoid long stretches of time waiting for seeds to germinate and grow enough to occupy the space (which just invites weeds to occupy it instead), and so that you can place them individually – see Tardissing the Space Part 2.

You need to avoid gluts – one of the secrets of eating really well out of a garden is to plant very small quantities of a very big variety, and plant them sequentially. Using a nursery to raise seedlings and planting a few seeds every week is an important puzzle piece. Obtain a yield is the permaculture principle, but twenty lettuces ready at once is a problem, not a yield. It will have you trying to think up recipes for lettuce soup, and there is a good reason why lettuce soup has never become a culinary staple! You really only need two or three loose leaf lettuces bearing at once, but you need another two or three coming on to replace them, and another two or three seedlings nearly ready to plant out, and another two or three of the strongest just germinated babies selected for potting up. You need rocket and aragula and mustard cress and mizuna and baby beets and celery and parsley and shallots to go with them, but you only need the same tiny quantities of all of them. You can eat very well out of a very small garden if you can get this right. I wrote about sequential planting here, and it’s even more of a mainstay in this new, tiny suburban garden.

And you need to plant out seedlings with an eye to both the time and the space they will need – which requires a bit of plant research or experience, which sounds scary. But I find standing in the garden with a pot in hand, thinking about where might be the perfect gap for it to fill is one of the best bits of gardening. I catch myself in the kind of “flow” experience that you get from any creative work.

The bed in the picture has never been empty, or even much less than full. Everything is dancing in time. The trellis behind the broccolini has telephone peas, planted when the broccolini was small enough to give them enough of a head start to get up above it. They’re harvesting light at the two metre level now. The dino kale at the back is short now but will grow tall, and will be there for months. The snow peas that occupied the trellis behind it are finished, and a Richmond Valley cucumber is planted in their place. It will be well away before the kale gets tall. The silver beet will need more space as it matures, but the carrots will come out by then, and be replaced with seedling leeks. By the time they need more space, the silver beet can come out. The leeks in the middle are nearly ready to be harvested, and that’s a good spot for the coriander waiting in the nursery to go in – I can leave it to grow tall and mature there, so I can harvest the seed.

It’s a bit like painting in plants, making a picture that constantly changes, every bit of the canvas used.