Square Inch Gardening?

Jackie Wall in garden

I’m sure everyone has heard of Square Foot Gardening, a method of intensive gardening that spaces vegetables closer together. But I’m more of a Square Inch kind of gardener– and for good reason.

On our half acre homestead we have boulders sticking up out of the soil that must be the size of a Volkswagen. There’s no telling how big these rocks are under the surface. We also have land that slopes on either side into unusable growing space. Additionally, most of our food is grown in five hours of sun. Yet we have tremendous abundance here in spite of the extreme conditions.

We make sure we grow our food in a way that allows us to harvest maximum yields from each plant.

If you walk through a forest you will notice that, among the trees, there is no such thing as bare ground. You will find deep leaf litter and downed tree branches. If you scrape the leaf litter aside, you will find rich, dark, loamy soil full of life.

Mother Nature does not like to be unclothed, yet modern gardening calls for neat rows of a vegetable with immaculate (naked) soil between the plants and the rows!

If you’re growing this way you are slowly starving your soil to death– as the sun parches the ground and rains roll away off the bed. That’s why I use a much more intense planting method. In addition to mulching wherever possible, I plant things really close together to protect the soil.

Granted, vegetables tend to be “choosy” about their neighbors. They don’t always play well with other vegetables. But so many plants do grow well together such that it’s practically impossible to have bare soil. For example, broccoli doesn’t especially like lettuce, which is a shame, because the broad leaves of the broccoli plants would shade the lettuce which likes cooler soil. Broccoli does like beets. When planted together, the beets will grow at about the same rate as the broccoli so both plants will get enough sun but both have broad enough leaves to shade and protect the soil.

I tend to crowd plants a lot closer together than the distance recommended on seed packets. I haven’t noticed any problems from this. I know– I can almost hear someone saying that you will get blight on tomatoes if you plant too close together! But that issue can be solved with diligent pruning. I’m just giving you one example. Here’s another: spinach and lettuce can be planted really close together. Yep, the leaves can yellow at the tips when they overlap, but we generally harvest outer leaves and let the interiors grow and the distance between the plants stays a perfectly manageable one to two inches.

We also grow intensively by trellising any food that can grow up instead of out. Bush beans take up a lot of space, but pole beans can climb a fence, a trellis or a tee-pee made from skinny straight limbs or bamboo and leave precious garden space for other vegetables.

Another method we use is to grow certain vegetables like potatoes and sweet potatoes in grow bags. Some of our little half acre homestead is pure rock and boulder and there’s no way to put in even a tiny little mustard seed, but the grow bags – sitting on top of those boulders – give us much needed extra garden space.

Hands-on Workshops On How to Do All This
Our June, 2026 workshops are a hands-on, walk the homestead experience where you can see and learn exactly how you can harvest an abundance of food to feed your family from a small, difficult plot. For details, and to book this unique experience, click here.

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