Space is what you got
Gardens are different sizes. For most home gardens, the gardener would not need even a sand wedge to get from one side to the other. Some longer gardens, however, you might need a seven-iron or possibly a driver. When the gardener needs to actually drive, possibly in a side-by side, then it’s a farm, not a garden, because Uncle Wahoo’s Pocket Book of Semantics said so.
Size and what you do with it matters, so this discussion will focus on ways to maximize your space (if you want to) in typical home gardens. My garden fence encompasses 2124 square feet or .049 acres, a medium size putting green, with about 30 garden beds of various shapes and sizes. I start each year with boundless ambition for how to make the most of the space because I want to grow everything and therefore, I overdose on my seed orders.
Clever gardeners (and those who order too many seeds) figure out ways to be creative with limited space. A lesson I have learned is boundless ambition with lots of seeds is no match for not having enough time to follow through, so it’s okay to be real about your commitment, but I say go for it anyway. Simplify your strategies for maximizing your garden space.
This is totally second-hand – I was not there – but I read that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (or Nineveh or wherever they were) were actually elaborately overplanted cascading balconies or terraces for aesthetic effect more than for growing vegetables. That’s cool too, but we can adapt the idea for vegetables and have dinner growing at eye-level.
I have a six-foot tall circle of rebar with a diameter of 16 inches in a circular bed. I have planted Purple Pole beans (an Ozark native) around the bottom, and the vines easily reached the top and kept going except they had nowhere to grow but down again, so in less than two square feet there were beans growing up and down their trellis plus lettuce, spinach or arugula was growing around the bottom. Healthy snow peas also will grow to the top of the trellis and go sideways or back down.
Which brings us to trellises not in a circle. Trellises are a natural focal point because they are vertical. An easy way to make a trellis in our area is to pound T-posts through the rocks. The rocks have been here for millennia, so they are local like lichens and deserve respect.
A curved skinny bed 12 feet long could have five T-posts pounded every three feet marking four obvious planting spaces. Insert bamboo stakes for verticals between the T-posts and weave, crochet or macrame twine in your favorite design in between for vines to climb on.
As for what could grow there, after the last frost, a gardener could plant Armenian cucumbers, Malabar spinach, golden snow peas and pole beans. On the sunny side in front of them as companions could be dill, alyssum, cilantro and lettuce.
Companion planting is an important element of intensive gardening. There are both legends and science behind this approach to gardening, more discussion than my remaining 60 words will allow. The basic tenet underlying intensive gardening is well-prepared soil. Then a gardener can challenge space constraints and pack in mutually beneficial groups of plants, like basil with marigolds alongside tomatoes.
There are tomes galore citing beneficial pairings such as asparagus with parsley, carrots with tomatoes and onions with strawberries. There are also unfortunate pairings such as onions with peas or strawberries, but you in your garden might have different results.
Also consider planning ahead for successive crops, (spinach after bush beans, etc.) in which a gardener gets more than one crop from the space before winter. If you are the gardener, you are integral to the cycle of seasons, seeds, weather, moons, years and asparagus. You are the spacemaster.