Kitchen Garden Magazine

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Gardening by grid reference

Having built a new raised bed, Toby Buckland was determined to make the most of the available space, so he decided to try a technique designed to help pack in the produce

Looking for things to do with the kids in the school holidays, I found myself flicking through an old children’s encyclopaedia. Among its dog-eared pages I stumbled across an artist’s impression of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Built of stone and shaped like a ziggurat, the gardens were both beautiful and space efficient. Fruits, vegetables and flowers were packed into beds that sat one on top of the next creating a cascade of produce and colour.

As necessity is the mother of invention, I can only imagine that their creator, King Nebuchadnezzar II, was as stuck for growing space in his garden as I am. What with the children claiming the lawn as a football pitch and a washing line over the patio, it doesn’t leave much space for home-grown veg.

Without a doubt the back garden is the most convenient place to grow produce as pest problems are more likely to be spotted early and crops picked and served food-mile-free when at their peak. However, like many KG readers, I’m short on space so I grow the lion’s share of fruit and veg away from my house.

Last year I had two vegetable plots and neither in walking distance of the back door: my allotment that’s some three miles away and a walled courtyard in Wandsworth, South London. Since I live in South Devon, the latter took up the most travel time although, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to do the daily watering as the garden was created for UKTV’s Great Food Live show and maintained by the production team. Under my care were the ‘cream jobs’ of planning, sowing and harvesting, which sounds perfect… but wasn’t, as no matter how hard I tried, my salads always wilted on the train-ride home.

Of course, the plot at the TV studios in Wandsworth isn’t really for my enjoyment but as a luscious outdoor location for filming and to provide a few fresh pickings for the TV chefs who come and go. My claim to fame is that those crops have been picked by the illustrious hands of James Martin, Antony Worral-Thompson and Camilla Parker-Bowles’s son, Tom, who was there talking about his new book ‘The Year of Eating Dangerously’. I’m hoping my veg didn’t come into this category!

The studio beds have worked so well that this summer I’ve come up with a plan to reorganise what crops I grow where. Instead of growing everything at the allotment, I’m going to reserve it for vegetables that drag their heels and are slow to crop such as purple sprouting and spuds. Sun lovers like chilli peppers and aubergines, leafy salads, summer herbs – in fact anything that I can grab for a garnish or a sandwich filling will squeeze into a corner of my garden. This way I can pop out and harvest what I want without making a special trip to the plot or the Big Smoke.

At the TV studios the beds are all raised and they work for many crops, particularly salads. Raised beds make for easy picking and good growing as the steep sides lift crops up into the sun and act like the ramparts of a castle, keeping slugs and snails at bay. Of course, a steep wall isn’t an obstacle to a determined slug but they make patrolling for these plant munchers much easier and greatly increase the efficiency of organic ‘ferric-phosphate’ slug-pellets when sprinkled like minefields around the base and the rim of the bed.

The other advantage is that that you can customise the topsoil with lashings of compost if your garden soil is poor or even buy new earth if necessary. If your garden is a mixture of builders’ rubble and potters’ clay, check out local turf suppliers who’ll deliver first-rate topsoil in tidy one-tonne bags to your door.

The soil in my garden isn’t bad and as my salad bed is just one part of a larger terracing scheme (Nebuchadnezzar eat your heart out!) I’ve plenty of it too. The best time to improve a bed is as it’s built so I’m burying lifted sods of turf at the bottom to beef up the humus content and piling in compost rich soil on the top. As long as the grass is buried beneath a good 20cm (8in) of earth it won’t make a comeback but will encourage plenty of earthworm activity low down and improve water retention. Eight inches of soil is plenty for salads, as they’re not particularly deep-rooted but I’m doubling that depth in case I fancy growing a carrot or two later down the line.

Because my new bed is small – 90cm by 1.2m (3x4ft) – it suits a style of close planting first devised back in the 1970s and known as the ‘grid system’. This is the same method I used on the UKTV plot and it turned out to be extremely efficient and productive. It involves dividing the ground into squares roughly 30cm (1ft) across to make 12 separate areas, each dedicated to a different crop. Bamboo canes laid on the soil are the simplest way to do this but, knowing that these will be an invitation for my kids to play at sword fighting, I’ve opted for the more permanent string and peg method. Looking at the string against the bare ground from above it looks as stark as the street plan for downtown New York, but hopefully as the seeds start to sprout the effect will be more a patchwork quilt of foliage colour.

The spacings in a grid are close, as little as 15cm (6in) apart for a French bean – enough room to fit four plants in every 30cm (12in) square. As for the leafy crops I’m majoring on this summer, I’ve not bothered with rows and broadcast the seed then roughly spaced the seeds with my finger to give them 2.5cm (1in) between each one. These spacings are much closer than those recommended on the seed packets. This is because salads like lettuce and rocket are grown as cut-and-come-again crops, harvested when a few inches tall by scissoring off the top, leaving the bottom inch to re-grow for two or three cuts. Although this uses more seed, the diversity of yield per yard is much higher, giving a good range of regular pickings from a small space.

However you sow, it pays to mollycoddle seeds at this time as a sudden hot spell can cause them to stall or die. For new beds, allowing the soil to settle for a fortnight and treading with the soles of your boots settles the earth and ensures moisture from deep in the soil can soak up to the surface, via what’s called capillary action, to nourish the fledgling roots. I always pre-soak the seed drills and patches for broadcasting with a can of water before sowing and then sprinkle spent potting compost over the top. Being darker than the soil, it marks the location of the emerging seedlings and holds essential moisture around the seeds as they germinate.

As well as sowing seed directly, start a few veg off in pots for planting the moment a gap in the grid is free. Tender types like chilli peppers and tomatoes are widely available pot grown if you haven’t sown them already, while spring onions, round beetroot varieties, leeks and salads can all be multi-sown. This technique, as the name suggests, means sowing three or more seeds of the same vegetable in each module of a cell tray. When they emerge don’t thin but treat as one big plant that’ll produce a number of baby veg for picking over a longer period. The trick is to cut rather than pull what you need, creating extra growing space and leaving neighbouring roots undisturbed.

As well as slugs, I’ve had to re-learn another pest protection tip essential when sowing a suburban veg patch: holly sprigs pushed into the soil to fend off cats looking for a loo. I wonder if Nebuchadnezzar had the same problem!

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