Practicality and reality of in bed spacing

I'm curious if anyone has followed the chart in Grow More Vegetables for in bed spacing for all vegetables. It sounds totally bonkers to plant okra at 1' spacing, as single plants have grown 10 ft tall and 8 ft wide for me from June to September in a decently hot summer in Kentucky (zone 6a+). It seems like they'd grow even larger in California, so I cannot fathom where this 1' spacing recommendation came from. How does one justify spending 50 times more on seeds (in the case of my okra)? What about climbing peas? Less than a foot spacing per plant while filling the whole bed? How in the world do you harvest efficiently or even harvest the inner bed at all? It does make sense to not plant in rows, have wide beds that use space efficiently, but the in bed spacing recommendations don't mesh with my experience at all. What about tomatoes? or anything tall for that matter? Please enlighten me!

We might be thinking about different books but this is what I remember from the book.

60% carbon farming
30% high caloric-space root crops
10% herbs/vegetables/okra.

His beds were only 20ft X 5ft   or   25ft x 4ft.
I would go with the 4ft or 5ft wide beds. Esp for greens, which would be continuously harvested. Now if it was something that all ripen/harvested within 3 or so days, then we wouldn't have to worry as much about how wide the bed are in terms of crushing plants. (In my head I am thinking about a garlic farm).

In that book I think that he also plant stuff that spread at the edge of the beds so that they can spill out in the walkway, and not in the center where they would crowd out stuff.

I think he also says that one should expect 1/5 the harvest in the 1st year compared to the 4th year. You have to save the seeds of the plants that did well and cull the seeds of the plants that did horrible. So maybe you would end up selecting for dwarf plants or something.

You can densely plant leafy vegetables, in fact sometimes the more shade they have the bigger, milder and softer the leaves are while in full sun they become small, stringy, with bitter taste. But the reverse happens with fruiting vegetables. You get less and less produce. Actually for something like garlic I would give it even less that 1ft x 1ft but for something like watermelon I would give it alot more space.

50% of the energy that plants absorb with their leaves is dumped into the soil, so that they can trade from scarce minerals with the soil life, so if your soil is fertile enough, you can reduce that to maybe just 10% or 20%.

As an example of saving the most adopted seeds, growing up in the tropics my sweet potatoes vines would grow 50ft+, but here in Boston they only grow 5ft or so.

I believe Bengi is right.

Here are some threads of interest:

https://permies.com/t/20295/grow-vegetables-John-Jeavons

https://permies.com/t/55975/Struggling-biointensive-Grow-Vegetables-book

I found a pic of his garden plans. Let me know if this 20ft x 5ft looks familiar to you.

I read the book that you are talking about. It’s the same I’m referencing. None of you are answering the questions I asked. Do you actually give plants that can get many feet wide only 1 ft between plants in the prescribed triangle pattern? An okra seed for example, can produce a 10 ft tall by 8 ft across shrub for me in a few months that yields copious amounts of okra so that you need a bucket to harvest from plants that grew from 8 seeds. It would cost at least 50 times more for seed to plant enough seed using 1 ft spacing to fill the same space as seeds spaced 4 ft apart in rows 8 ft apart. What advantage would there be to severely crowding the plants thats worth 50x the seed cost?

Edit: The book says 12” bed spacing and 159 plants per 100 ft. I don’t see how that is 12” spacing but moving on… My 8 plants that got 8ft across took up 512 sq ft. 8 seeds = 512 sq ft vs 159 seeds (if all germinate) = 100 sq ft. To fill the same area that my 8 plants did using biointensive methods I’d have to plant 815 seeds. That’s more than 100 times the seed cost.

While this isn't bio-intensive, let me know if this video helps you to visualized okra with 1ft spacing.


Here is another example but with beefsteak tomatoes
https://youtu.be/ITZtFdXvS10?t=209


Regular orchards plant 100 peach tree/acre ( they get 3ton of fruit). But some orchard plant 1,000/acre (they get 22ton of fruit/acre).
Yes they plant over 10times as many peach tree per acre, most people would wonder how that is even possible.
http://calag.ucanr.edu/archive/?type=pdf&article=ca.v033n09p4

IN fact for leafy greens you can plant even closer to the point where you basically have micro-greens and you then them weekly/daily as they grow. until you end up with the square foot.

Square foot gardening is not the same like having some mulberry tree in zone 5. That you only visit every so often. It's bio-Intensive and need to be right by your door, so that you can manage it. It might be no-till but it is still work, you cant just sit back and grow say 10acres like you would with corn/wheat. So in that sense it is not practical to treat it like mint or mulberry in zone5 it is in your zone1, maybe you even have to think of it as your zone0, just light up the grill, get some lawn chair.

It's to get the maximum yield per foot of bed, he's looking for a maximum yield per foot not a maximum yield per plant. For example I plant tall peas, they are planted 1/2 inch apart in the row. if they were for dried peas they would need about a foot between rows, as they are for fresh I have to allow 3ft so I can get in there. I also plant short peas, they are planted 1/2 inch apart with 1ft between rows. To harvest you either crawl or get a stool and plonk it in the patch. Each individual pea would produce more if I gave them a foot of space each but the bed would produce less over all.

Commercial bush beans are planted basically touching, in the row they will only harvest once so competition is less important than with plants that grow for longer and that gives the highest yield per acre.

If you look at carrots the absolute weight of carrot you get is pretty much the same from planting carrots 1/2 inch apart to 3 inches apart but the size of the individual carrot changes. So in that example it would depend on what you were looking for, big storage carrots or valuable baby carrots.

I have seen corn being grown one foot apart by commercial farming methods, I don't know if that practice is still being used.

My efforts were undone by wildlife so I have nothing to offer that is firsthand.

Here are some examples by some of our other members as this is all I can offer:





https://permies.com/t/53888/Quick-Breakdown-Bio-Intensive-practice






https://permies.com/t/53890/Fine-tuning-Biointensive#450136

Do I feel that this method works? Yes

Hey All,

This is a great Topic to Discuss!

There are so many variables involved!
Methodologies, plants, environmental, factors, Planting depth, ad hoc!
So no all be it answer can be provided for all!
Thus deviation will occur!

The real answer can only really be given from experience and knowing the specific site and interacting and observing it!
I would advise to think of it as a Recipe, Not a formula!

With that in mind would anyone Like to discuss Systems and Methodologies!

Regards,
Alex

My version of this book calls for seeding okra in flats or broadcast at 1" and then thin to 12" in the bed. But the spacing is never explained in the book and I think in practice much of the spacing guidelines were never empirically tested. And when I reference them with spacing recommendations for SC from Clemson, many of them aren't much different. I typically stick to Clemson's guidelines and not what's in the book. I use this book as a very rough guide for doing biointensive.

Hi Zach,

Welcome to Permies.

The high density planting doesn't just apply to vegetables.

Some orchard only plant 84 apple tree per acres, while others plant 1,600 per acres. https://apples.extension.org/understanding-apple-tree-size-dwarf-semi-dwarf-and-standard/

The yeild per acre is 5x with the higher apple planting density, but obviously the yeild per individual tree would be alot less.