One of the skills you need to keep your vegetable garden thriving is organisation. You will need to be able to sow seeds and when the seedlings are ready to plant out into your raised beds, you will need to work out where to put them.

This is where a space saving vegetable garden will help as by intercropping or inter-planting fast and slow growing vegetables, you will be able to harvest more vegetables from a smaller space.

Strawberries intercropping with Lettuce

This year I have my 2 year old strawberries which were moved into the triangle corners of my raised beds. They are growing strong and flowering at the moment, but around them there are small pockets of soil with nothing growing.

This space has now been filled with my red lettuce and although I didn’t plan this, it looks amazing against the dark green backdrop of strawberry leaves. This works well as the lettuce is fast growing and also doesn’t mind partial shade if the strawberries do grow a bit bushier.

Chard and Spinach interplanted with Onions

I have also planted my Chard and Perpetual Spinach in amongst my onions and garlic. My onions and garlic won’t be ready to harvest until July and are starting to fatten up their bulbs beneath the soil. So I have inter planted with these vegetables to save space.

This also works well as there isn’t a lot of green leaves to block the light from the seedlings and they still have space to grow larger by the time the onions are harvested in July.

5 Benefits of Intercropping or Interplanting

• Suppressing weeds – Less soil means less weeds to invade your bare soil taking up precious nutrients that the surrounding plants need.
• Effective watering and nutrients uptake – the water applied to the area will benefit both plants that have been interplanted together. The nutrients are shared in the soil. As there is no bare soil, there is no wastage of water.
• Better space management – plants will produce more with better space management, they will still require good air flow, light and moisture around the plant but the other plants might give them support or nutrients in the soil they need to thrive.
• Better pest control – some plants if grown together will control the pests in the area, this happens with companion planting as well.
• Stops soil erosion and crusty soil top – with plants being grown in a small space, they take up more soil which reduces the chance of soil eroding with the wind or the soil top going crusty because water hasn’t been applied to an area with no plants in it.