11 Proven Ways to Make Your Garden More Productive

I don't know about you, but when I take the time, energy, and money to plant an edible garden, I want it to produce as much food as possible for my family. With that in mind, here are my top 11 tips for getting the most from your vegetable garden.

1. Build up the soil. The number one thing you can do to make your garden more productive is to improve the soil. When I began gardening on my own (without my parents guiding me), I had terrible soil. It was heavy clay and had only ever grown grass, as far as I could tell. I planted a vegetable garden there, anyway, not really knowing much better. Sure, stuff grew. But it was nothing like the uber productive garden I had several years later, after adding trucked in soil and lots of organic matter. Do yourself a favor. Take the time to test your soil and add the recommended amendments. Then continue adding as much organic matter to the soil as possible. In the fall, rake fallen leaves into the garden beds. Add aged animal manure. Make compost, and add it to the soil in the spring (and throughout the summer, if you have enough). Mulch with organic materials like grass clippings or straw. All these things feed your plants far better than any store-bought fertilizer. You'll be amazed and how much better your garden grows!

2. Round off your raised beds or berms. Not being a math person, I was amazed to learn that the simple act of gently rounding the tops of your raised beds can give you a considerably more space to plant. For example, if your raised bed is 5 feet across, rounding the soil gives you a foot more growing room than if the soil in the bed was flat. If you have a 20 foot bed, that means you have 20% more growing room!

3. Stagger spacing. Neat freaks hate this one, but planting in perfect little rows is a less efficient use of space than staggering rows. If you stagger so plants are in triangles in your growing area, you'll get 10%  more growing space.

4. Plant intensively. Tighten up the spacing that plant tags and seed packets recommend - but don't go overboard. Intensively planted gardens require more water, more fertilizer, and more organic matter added to the soil. And plants that are too close for comfort never reach their full size or are as productive as they would be if they had a little more room.

5. Get rid of weeds. Few people enjoy weeding, but leaving weeds in the garden crowds out desirable plants while also stealing water and nutrients from them. So pull out those weeds when they are small. Use mulch. And whatever you do, don't let weeds go to seed. Get rid of weeds in walkways, too, by tilling pathways, or covering them with cardboard. Cover crops planted in the fall help, too. Buckwheat and oats are particularly good at crowding out weeds. (Learn more organic tips for weed control here.)

6. Grow vertical. The more plants you have growing up on trellises, fences, and other supports, the more room you have for additional plants. Good choices for vertical gardening include: pole beans, peas, cucumbers, smaller-sized squash (large squash are difficult to support if grown vertically), and indeterminant (vining) tomatoes.



7. Attract pollinators. I've heard some gardeners complain that their squash or cucumbers or...whatever...never produces - presumably because they never get pollinated. And I wonder how many other gardeners could have more productive gardens if their edibles were better pollinated. The key to great pollination is to eliminate all chemicals in the garden - and to plant flowers pollinators love. Perhaps an especially good way to do this is to plant attracting flowers in the middle of your edible garden, so pollinators must pass your fruits and vegetables to reach them.

8. Interplant. For example, in the spring, plant radishes among the lettuce and spinach. While the radishes are growing, the lettuce and spinach are small, and there's plenty of room for them all to grow. By the time you harvest the radishes, the lettuce and spinach will be ready for the extra room the removal of the radishes brings.

9. Use succession planting. For example, early in the spring, you could plant peas. When those are harvested, plant in some quick-maturing corn. When that is harvested, put in some fall lettuces. For best results, plant seedlings, not seeds, in the garden, and choose quickly maturing varieties.

10. Choose the right varieties. When choosing the seeds for any vegetable, I always choose one of the quickest-maturing varieties I can find - and I need a really good reason to select a variety that takes longer. That's because the quicker the plants grow and are harvested, the sooner I can replant the area with more plants, the more food I can get out of my garden.

11. Use season extenders. By adding cold frames or tunnels to your garden, you can gain several weeks of growing time at the beginning and end of the season. In fact, you can grow food right through winter!