Tony Dickerson answers your questions
Q How do I arrange my veg in raised beds? Ellen Price, by email
A Raised beds are a great way for young and old alike to grow vegetables. They provide good drainage, and it’s easy to improve the soil with plenty of organic matter. Raised beds are also a useful way to garden if you’ve restricted mobility, as they reduce the need to bend. There are really no hard and fast rules about what to grow and how to space vegetables, but certain combinations will work better than others. The spacings given on seed packets are derived from commercial growing, to obtain maximum yield of suitably sized crops for supermarket sale. They’re a useful guide, but in an intensive raised bed system you can generally space closer. However, don’t overcrowd. Beds of 1 sq m (11 sq ft) would support nine early potatoes spaced about 30cm (1ft) apart, as in the open garden. Thinking about the spread of other vegetables, you could use much the same spacing for dwarf French beans, lettuce, strawberries and herbs. Traditional row crops, such as carrots and spring onions, could be planted in rows about 15cm (6in) apart, but root crops, such as beetroot and kohl rabi, might do better being 30cm (12in) apart. I think you could only get away with four sweetcorn plants in beds of 1 sq m (11 sq ft). Each bed could support a wigwam of eight bamboo canes for runner and climbing French beans. You could plant lettuce or similar fast-maturing crops around the edge. Alternatively, with beans, you could place a bush courgette in the middle of the wigwam.
The big advantage of growing just a single type of vegetable in each bed is that, once it has finished, the bed can be prepared, fertiliser added and replanted. For example, an overwintered crop of broad beans could be followed by cabbage or oriental veg, or a quick crop of lettuce, garlic by French beans and early potatoes by kale. If you’ve too much of a mix, it can be difficult to replant or re-sow spaces as they become available on an ad hoc basis.