About 40 square metres, full time job, and year one was neat rows which by August looked like a list of chores I was failing. I am tempted to redo it as a mixed planting with perennial herbs and flowers through it, but I suspect that is aesthetics talking. Anyone who has run both, which one survived contact with a busy summer.
Rows exist for a reason and the reason is tools. If you hoe, a straight line lets you clear a bed in a few minutes standing up, and that is the difference between weeding taking ten minutes a week and taking a Saturday. In a mixed planting you are on your knees picking weeds out by hand between things you do not want to disturb. If you enjoy that, it is meditative, and if you do not, it is why the plot gets abandoned.
The hoe argument is the strongest one for rows and it only holds if you actually own a good hoe and use it weekly. Most people do not.
Yield per square metre is closer than people claim, but not identical. In my beds the mixed planting gave a bit less of any one thing and a lot more variety across the season, which suited how we actually cook. The measurable win was pests, we stopped getting wiped out by one bad year of a single problem because nothing was planted in a big block anymore.
I went full polyculture after reading too much and by July I genuinely could not find the beans inside the squash. Two things I would do differently: keep everything you want to harvest repeatedly on the outside edges, and give the sprawlers their own corner. It works, it just needs more discipline than the photos suggest.
Rows for anything you harvest all at once, mixed for anything you pick a handful at a time. Most people need both and get religious about one.
@mat_mira · 6mo ago · 3 replies
I have run both on the same site, rows for four years and then a mixed layout for five. The mixed one takes noticeably more thought at planting and noticeably less weeding by midsummer, because the ground is covered and there is nowhere for weeds to establish. What it costs you is harvesting speed and clarity, you cannot walk down a bed pulling one crop, and you will forget what you planted where unless you write it down. For someone with an hour on a weekday evening rather than a whole Saturday, the mixed bed won.
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@kernel_ring_buf · 6mo ago
Labels at both ends of every planting group and a photo on your phone in May. That is the entire system.
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@seedstart_sim · 6mo ago
The forgetting what is where problem is real, I lost two rows of beetroot to my own weeding last year.
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