Here’s the next important principle involved in urban farming.  We’ve got a 4X4 or 8X4 or similiar sized box, filled with soil.  We need to turn this into a high density producer.

The main proponent of this type of high density vegetable farming is the square foot gardener.  You can buy his book and read his site, but here’s the general idea.  We take a small raised garden and divide it into 1 foot by 1 foot squares.  Each square is then fully seeded with a specific plant.  By taking advantage of the space in each square right to the edges, and by removing any rows in the garden it’s surprising how much you can pack in in the way of variety and volume of vegetables.

Now there’s two other things that came out of the course I took at our local bookstore on raised bed gardening.  First, we built our garden on the east side of the house instead of the west (for better sunlight).  That’s not relevant to this post but I wanted to mention that :) .  Secondly, you can double plant stuff.  So in addition to having high density plantings, in some cases we can double up or vegetables in each square.

Oh, the third thing I learned is that this stuff isn’t rocket science.  Use your head, if it makes sense, try it.  So some of the stuff we’re doing may not work but it won’t likely be a complete catastrophe either.  Give it some thought, if it’s reasonable, do it.