Lisa, here. I'm the garden steward at Recreation Park Community Garden and have an 8'x16' plot there, plus I have an herb garden, native medicinals, edible landscaping, and a lot of containers at home.
I've designated two of my roughly 4'x4' containers as my Four Square beds. This one is my west bed, containing St. Valery carrots and Bull's Blood beets, both heirlooms from
Seed Savers.
I admit, I've gotten a little obsessive with this bed. As you can see on the right, germination was spotty the closer you got to the fence. So I spent many damp days gently prying out carrots from the soil and moving them, evening out the spacing.
There's about 180 carrots in this bed on 2" spacing. The beets had better germination on 3" centers around the edge.
The east bed is being planted in White Triumph sweet potatoes and leeks. The leeks were started from seed in lil greenhouses made of plastic blueberry containers. (I still have quite a few leek starts remaining, if anyone wants some.) The sweet potatoes are from Pinetree Garden Seeds and they are an ancient east coast variety that's actually a close relative of a morning glory!
This is my first blogger post ever, so please forgive clunkyness. More pix of the sweet potato planting next time!
These images were taken last week. You can see the carrots starting to really tower over the surrounding beets. When I water them, they completely flop over the beets on the west side of the bed.
In this photo, you can see the beautiful color of the Bull's Blood leaves. I think the beets are about an inch in diameter after 9 weeks. (They were planted on May 3.) That's one tiny carrot on the edge -- about an index finger-size. I've since pulled three more -- each getting to be a respectable size of about 6", although still a small carrot.
Here you can see the state of the leeks -- still pretty tiny. I have leeks planted about two weeks earlier in the ground at the community garden and they are about the size of a scallion now.
In this one, you can see the White Triumphs beginning to vine after just about 4 weeks in the ground.
