Beginner starter bed (square foot)
The same seven crops packed square-foot style: one tomato per square, nine bean plants, sixteen radishes. More food from the same bed, with more watering and thinning.
- Bed size
- 4′ × 8′
- Soil depth
- 12″
- Layout
- Square Foot Gardening
- Plants
- 198
- Sun
- Full sun — 6 to 8 hours.
Plant after your last frost (most of the U.S.: April–May). Direct-sow the beans, radish, and arugula; start the lettuce indoors or buy transplants, along with the tomatoes, basil, and marigolds.
What’s planted
- French marigold‘Naughty Marietta’16 plants · 6″ spacing
- Tomato‘Roma’2 plants · 12″ spacing
- Sweet basil‘Genovese’4 plants · 12″ spacing
- Loose-leaf lettuce‘Black Seeded Simpson’24 plants · 6″ spacing
- Bush bean‘Jade’72 plants · 4″ spacing
- Arugula‘Astro’16 plants · 6″ spacing
- Radish‘Cherry Belle’64 plants · 3″ spacing
Why these neighbors
- Roma tomato & Genovese basil
Basil volatiles (eugenol, linalool, methyl chavicol) have laboratory-documented deterrent activity against thrips, aphids, and whiteflies — the most common tomato pests in raised beds.
- Roma tomato & French marigold
French marigold roots release alpha-terthienyl, a peer-reviewed nematicide against root-knot nematode. Backed by university trials, and the most useful pairing in a beginner tomato bed.
- Jade bush bean & French marigold
The same nematode suppression that protects the tomato roots benefits the bush-bean block directly south, and trials back that up for beans too.
- Black Seeded Simpson lettuce & Cherry Belle radish
Shallow-rooted lettuce shades the radish seedbed for the first two weeks of germination, then the radishes are pulled at 25 days before the lettuce sizes up. Two crops per square foot without competition.
Care notes
- This is the square-foot version of the beginner starter bed — same seven varieties, same 4 × 8 ft footprint. Plants per square follow Mel Bartholomew's method, except basil: one plant per square instead of four, so it doesn't crowd the tomatoes.
- Square Foot Gardening assumes loose, friable soil. Mel's original mix is 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost; a bagged raised-bed soil from any garden center works fine.
- Cage the two Romas the day you transplant — Roma is a determinate (no pruning needed) but a cage keeps fruit off the soil. The 1-per-cell tomato spacing matches the SFG canon.
- Direct-sow the beans (9 per cell, 4" apart), radish (16 per cell, 3" apart), and arugula (4 per cell, 6" apart); set lettuce transplants 4 per cell, 6" apart. Mark each cell with string or a grid so the spacing stays measured.
- Re-sow the radish row every 2–3 weeks until late May — Cherry Belle hits maturity in 25 days, so each cell produces 3–4 successions in a single spring.
- Lettuce and arugula bolt at the first sustained 80 °F days. Pull bolters and replant those cells with another round of bush beans (more pods through August) or let one bed-row run to flower for pollinator food.
- Pinch basil flower buds weekly to delay bolting; bolted basil loses the volatile oils that help keep pests off the tomatoes.
- This bed packs roughly double the plant count of the mature-spacing twin in the same footprint — that's the SFG payoff, paid for with the upfront work of building Mel's soil mix.
Add it to your garden
Creates a new 4′ × 8′ raised bed with every plant pre-placed at the positions above. You can move things around in the planner afterwards.