Raised Bed Garden Layout Plans: 4×4 and 4×8 Beds
GardenDraft Team · August 20, 2026 · 6 min read
Part of: Garden Planning Guides · Raised Bed Gardening Guides
A raised bed is the easiest place to grow vegetables, and the 4×4 and 4×8 sizes are the most popular for a simple reason: four feet is the widest you can reach into from both sides without stepping on the soil. Once you've built and filled your bed, the question is what to plant where. Here are concrete starter plans you can copy, built on the square-foot method of dividing the bed into one-foot squares.
How the square-foot grid works
Picture the bed gridded into one-foot squares (sixteen in a 4×4, thirty-two in a 4×8) and plant each square by the size of the crop, not in rows. Big plants take a whole square (or more); small ones share. As a rough guide per square: one tomato, pepper, or eggplant; two cucumbers on a trellis; four lettuces or bush beans; nine spinach or beets; sixteen carrots, radishes, or onions. Each plant's page lists its exact spacing, so you can swap crops in and out.
A 4×4 plan (16 squares) for a first bed
This salad-and-salsa bed packs a lot into a small footprint. Put the trellis on the north side so it doesn't shade the rest:
- North row: 2 trellised cucumbers, 1 tomato, 1 pepper.
- Second row: 1 basil, 4 bush beans, 4 bush beans, 1 marigold (to draw pollinators and deter pests).
- Third row: 4 lettuce, 4 lettuce, 9 spinach, 9 spinach.
- South (front) row: 16 carrots, 16 radishes, 16 carrots, 16 onions.
The tall crops sit north, the quick crops (lettuce, radishes, spinach) sit up front where you'll be replanting them through the season.
A 4×8 plan (32 squares)
Treat a 4×8 as two 4×4s and give yourself room for a second wave. Use the north end for tall, season-long crops — a row of trellised cucumbers or pole beans, two or three tomatoes, peppers and eggplant — then step down through bush beans, basil, and bushier herbs in the middle, to the fast, low crops (lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, radishes, green onions) along the sunny south end. Keep a couple of front squares deliberately open in spring so you have somewhere to drop succession sowings of salad and roots as the first crops finish.
Make it last across seasons
Group the same plant families together within the bed so you can shift each group to a new area next year for simple crop rotation — easy in a 4×8 split into quadrants. Pay attention to companion planting as you slot crops in, and lean on vertical supports for vining crops to free up ground squares. Then set each crop's sowing and transplant dates on the planting calendar so the bed fills in on schedule.
Frequently asked questions
- What can I plant in a 4×4 raised bed?
- A lot, using the square-foot method: gridded into 16 one-foot squares, a 4×4 bed holds a few tall crops on the north side (a tomato, pepper, trellised cucumbers) plus blocks of bush beans, lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes, and onions up front — a full salad-and-salsa garden.
- How many plants fit in a square foot?
- It depends on size: one tomato or pepper per square, two trellised cucumbers, four lettuces or bush beans, nine spinach or beets, sixteen carrots, radishes, or onions. Each plant's page lists its exact spacing so you can swap crops in and out.