Down with Rows!

I've been replying to threads in the permaculture disscussion group on Facebook, and decided to re-post some of them here.

Annual vegetables needn't be grown in rows of identical plants. Giant farms do it because their tractors like straight lines and it makes harvesting faster to have one crop all together. But in a yard, the extension of your home, aesthetics should matter, and when you create a beautiful space you want to live in, you'll give your garden way more of your time and attention, I promise. It's beneficial to have different things growing next to each other, with flowers for attracting beneficial insects throughout the whole space. The most direct competition for resources comes from the same species of plants growing next to each other. A row of the same plant also makes it easy for bugs who like that plant to find one and then the rest of them down the line. If you think of the (perennial and annual) vegetables as landscaping plants you can eat, you'll create a much more beautiful space than the rows of a basic (rather uncreative) back yard garden. Looking at the architecture of each plant can help you create clumps or groupings of things with different heights and shapes. You can use the shade of something that likes full sun (like tomatoes) to shelter a smaller something that doesn't mind some shade during the hot times of the year (like lettuce or basil). Also, rows maximize pathway area, and in a small space you want to have as much square footage devoted to food as possible. Key hole beds and mandala gardens offer shapes that maximize planting area while ensuring that you can easily reach the plants.

Some species need at least one other sister plant near them for pollination (and therefore fruiting) to take place, but most of the time back yards are small enough that it isn't an issue for the other tomato or whatever to be several yards away. A few plants, corn for instance, need to be in a closely planted group of themselves for adequate pollination, but I personally don't think corn is the best crop for a small scale garden -seems to do better the more numbers there are. We tried the native american method of growing corn, beans, and squash in one patch, and honestly I think it made harvesting each of those things at the end of the summer way more of a hassle. The idea is that the squash is the ground cover for shading out weeds, and the corn provides the trellis for the beans, which provide nitrogen for the corn and the squash. This is an example of "over-yielding polycultures", what permaculturists strive to create in their gardens: combinations of plants that benefit each other, creating situations where they can yield more than if they were grown all alone.

If your yard is at all sloped, it's in your very best interests to think about how water runs down hill when you're planning where to put beds. You may need to create low earth mounds on the down slope side of the bed to prevent the water from just flowing away.

this link talks about polyculture plantings in a mandala shape:
http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/Permaculture-Mandala-Garden/

and this one has nice drawings of key hole bed set up:
http://www.the-gardeners-calendar.co.uk/tgc2009/news/story.asp?nid=2414