New Quickcrop Square Foot Urban Vegetable Garden

New Quickcrop Square Foot Urban Vegetable Garden

If you have read any of our previous blog posts you will know that we are rather spoiled at Quickcrop with our large rural gardens with plenty of room to grow in. If you have a smaller urban garden and watch our videos thinking "that's all very well if you have half acre of ground but what about me?" then this article is for you.

I am the lucky guinea pig for this one so we are using my back yard with available space of 7.5m (24ft) x 5.5m (18ft), about the size of a small city garden.  As I've said my garden is about as far from urban as it's possible to get so I've taken the liberty of adding a nice Victorian street (photoshop) on the other side of my wall just to get us all in the mood. It looks like a nice area so we're all looking forward to meeting the neighbours.

Urban raised bed vegetable garden

So what's the plan? To construct a modular garden using 4 of our 6ft x 4ft  split level raised beds and 2 of our 4ft by 4ft beds and create a neat and tidy growing space with a seating area in the middle. The garden will feature 2 levels of vegetables at 540 and 360 mm high bounded by a trellis frame for climbing plants so should give us plenty of scope to grow a broad variety of crops.

Square foot vegetable garden plan We have created a new square foot gardening system that uses larger spacings than the original version. I have plenty of respect for the very popular SFG system but do feel some of the spacings are too close to grow decent size crops. You are better to give plants the room they need as vigorous, well fed crops will withstand attack from pest and diseases much better than overcrowded ones.

You can see on the SFG version of the plan below I have divided the bed up into square foot sections where we will be planting a fixed number of each crop. You will notice some squares are larger than a foot to cater for larger plants but the system all revolves around a single square or multiples thereof.

The beds will be simply divided with a grid made by running gardeners twine through nails hammered into the bed every foot which is quick and easy to do. Twine is handy to use as it can be cut to make harvesting easier and re-strung in minutes by always leaving the fixing nails in place.

We will be adding a selection of Square Foot Gardening plans in the coming weeks which are free for you to use as well as developing a square foot garden builder on our website. All our plans can also be purchased as a plant tray containing all the seedling plants featured in the plan.

square foot raised bed vegetable garden

Documenting the build We hope to create a really useful resource with this build and will be documenting the project with written and video work to produce a new set of tutorials. If you would like to follow our progress keep and eye on this blog article as we will be adding to it and check out our Youtube channel for video updates.