Grow Your Own Magazine

morning.. got a puzzle and thought i would turn to you good folks to help..

I've a slightly raised bed in the garden, long, 1 meter by 3 meters, west to east orientation, the western end slightly in shadow under trees (in shadow 10am to 1pm). I'd like to use the square foot gardening method (to make the most of every scrap of soil in what is a small garden) to grow tomatoes in that bed, and there's just over 3 feet to a meter. what this means is that i could - in theory at least - have three rows of tomatoes in that bed, 9 tomatoes in each row.

great so far.

My niggling worry is that if i did this, the middle row of tomatoes would be enclosed on both sides by other tomato plants, and since the space around the plants would be crowded, its going to limit air flow - and that, we all know, leads to all kinds of lovely problems which i'd rather not have to deal with..

Would i be better doing say 2 long rows of tomatoes, then growing either some thing else (low growing) or say, small bush tomatoes (like tumbling tom) as the third row (facing south), or would i be okay with the three rows, as long as i kept ontop of cutting out suckers, training the main stem, and making sure that - especially towards the end of the life cycle - there weren't too many leaves crowding into the space and that there is plenty of air flow around them? The problem with bush/determinate tomatoes is that i know they're prone to botryitis and things because of the airflow problem - which would just exerberate the whole thing..

Any thoughts?

keth
xx

27 sounds a bit crowded, especially considering the dreaded b....

Here's our outdoor toms in the end of a 1.05m x 3.6m raised bed, 2 years ago. I think they were too close, but most cropped okay and didn't get blight until very late on. However last year with a similar arrangement they went down to blight early, most without cropping. Gonna space them a bit more this year.



You could try inter-cropping with lettuces, as they don't mind shade?

__________________
Manda.

"Wouldn't it be nice
For maybe an hour
To not have a care."

thats what i was thinking, to space them a bit more and intercrop with other things. Lettuce had already occured to me, i could do other things as well when the tomato plants are younger. perhaps just do 2 rows of tomatoes so that i have space between the tomatoes and sides of the bed to raise small plants, maybe some herbs.

okay. you've decided me... not gonna push to get 27 in. 18 it is - may even scale back to 14, and put a couple courgette plants at the ends or something. we'll see.

thanks!!

keth
xx