Large versus small growing spaces

General Discussions
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I’ve been rereading Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties (it’s such a great book!), and I came across a paragraph near the end that made me pause and think.

She said that she likes her squash plants to have huge vines, because if she can get the same yield from one big plant versus ten small plants in exactly the same space, one big plant is less work to care for.

I had to stop for a minute and reread that, because I realized I want exactly the opposite.

I grew a maxima squash last year that took up a quarter of my entire growing space all by itself. And it didn’t even produce its first female flower until July. Given that my ten pepo squashes that took up the same space had been fruiting since June and had given me at least twenty squashes by that point, I was super annoyed. And then, when the maxima finally had three tiny squashes starting to grow, it suddenly wilted and died because it couldn’t handle a week of 100 degree temperatures! What a diva.

For me, one plant that takes up a lot of space is a huge gamble. Ten small plants, especially if they’re from ten different varieties, will give me a much better yield. Even if they all die and there’s nothing to harvest, that will yield me useful information about the species in general. A sample size of one tells me nothing. And if they all live, I’ll have more diversity in colors, shapes, and flavors to eat, which is more fun.

High-risk low-reward versus low-risk high-reward. Which would I prefer? Gee, hard choice . . .

When space isn’t a limiting factor, however, which is which can easily switch.

When space doesn’t matter, diversity is easy to achieve, and human time becomes the limiting factor. Thus, with small plants, high reward becomes low reward (diversity of yield in a small space), and low risk becomes high risk (more human time required to harvest each square foot of space). Thus, fewer large plants to get the same yield is preferable.

It seems to me like this may be a common difference in priorities between those who have large growing spaces and those who have small growing spaces.

What do you think?

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Based on your words, she did say the same yield, but I have only seen one large squash that has a yield similar to 10 small squash, and that was a matter of sheer mass rather than numbers. *

Big vines take longer to mature, naturally, and tend to have the growing nodes farther apart. Even assuming the same yield for the space it is likely that the big plant would fruit later, have fewer blossoms, and thus fewer (if perhaps larger) fruit.

On the other hand, large plants do not have to be divas. While my experience may not be normal, from my perspective larger plants seem to throw off pests and disease more easily, recover more easily from attack, and they tend to put down additional roots so one part of the plant might die while the rest survives.

And I would be interested to know what she jeans by “easier to care for,” because that has not been my experience.

*My mother grew a banana squash that definitely fit the criteria. Those things were massive, and we ate them all winter. They easily rivaled the sheer mass of all the zucchini we ate during the summer, and the plants were indestructible. I purchased seeds a few years ago and it was not the same. The plants were fragile, bloomed and fruited late, couldn’t handle heat or drought, and died well before the first frost.

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Huh! The diva I had was a banana squash. I was so excited about it, because I had saved the seeds from a delicious fruit, but the fact that it fruited so late and took up so much space was frustrating. And then it went and died, after monopolizing that much of my garden, and the bush zucchinis I replaced it with did just fine!

Carol Deppe also mentioned in another book (The Tao of Vegetable Gardening?) that her favorite squash was the Guatamalan Blue Banana, which had been lost by the seed companies, and it was now nowhere near as good as it had been, and she wishes she had saved seeds from it.

I wonder if all the banana squashes are like that these days. Excessive inbreeding?

Next year, for my maxima squashes,I’m planning to try the Pueblo Highlands landrace from the Experimental Farm Network. It looks very promising, especially for my climate.

Maybe what she means by “easier to care for” is that they’re more disease resistant and stronger? Hard to say. All I know from personal experience so far is that my bush pepos seem to be a lot stronger, more disease resistant, more productive, and more drought tolerant than my vining pepos.

Actually, Lauren, you’re the right person to ask about this. Carol Deppe also mentioned that she has run tests to see what the roots were like of the bush squashes versus the vining ones, and she’s found the vining ones consistently have deep taproots, and the bush ones consistently spread out, so the vining ones are way more drought tolerant. That has me a little worried, because I strongly prefer the bush form, and I really want high drought tolerance.

You dry farmed cucurbits in Utah for quite awhile. Have you seen a correlation between growth habit and drought tolerance?

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Many other things make difference in what might work better. Big vining squash tend to rely atleast partially to rooting from nodes to get extra water and nutrients which might not be very effective in dry enviroment. Atleast I would think it doesn’t happen as fast as in wetter climate. Even if they root well I don’t think it is as effective in getting nutrients and water as many small plants. So there might be more for other plants and if interplanted with others neither is affected as much by others and total yield is good. Certainly lengthy vines without roots from nodes takes more energy to transport water and nutrients that short vines. I have more of an opposite experience, but it might be that bushy varieties have been too demanding for warmth to do well here. Only summer squash bushes too well.

In tomatoes I have done some yield comparisons, and counting out micro dwarfs and cherry tomatoes, different size plants can have very similar yield potential with appropriate spacing. I only grow what could be grown as bush, but there is still lots of variation in size. Smallest yielder has been 40-50cm quite narrow bush with small (bigger than cherry tomatoes) to medium fruit with 7 plants in m2 and bigger plants have been more vining with max density of 2,5 plants per m2. Small have been faster, but with limited season I can’t use that space anyway after they are done. In itself speed is important, but so is having less transplants or plants to care.

In my breeding I might not look as much about small size, but more determinate growth and short cropping period. Some of the smaller plants might still have longer cropping period than some of the medium to bigger plants

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Another interesting and only slightly related to the question of large and small plants: Commercial breeders have been selecting higher yielding plants 'under ideal (fertilized) conditions" . Which basically means that many crops have changed their leaf:fruit ratio, and need more fertilizer because they have less leaf area to photosynthesize to support creating a harvest.

For example… according to Mark Schatzker in the Dorito Effect, 100 years ago tomato plants were giant and much less productive. On the one hand, that’s great, on the other hand now they need much more care and inputs to create that high production. And those tomatoes aren’t as good. So now if I see a tomato plant that has a high yield with hardly any leaves I’m suspicious (but open to hearing if these plants can still survive under low input conditions).

Another example I think might follow this pattern— the Lofthouse maximas are giant vigorous plants that usually have only one (very delicious, early and often large) squash (caveat: in my case and from the seeds I gave some people, but I think they’re more productive in Joseph’s garden). They grow better in poor soil than the heirlooms I planted. So they need the giant leaves in order to accomplish all this. In my case, it’s great because they survived the terrible conditions I gave squash and the others didn’t (and tasted much better).

In the book Darwinian Agriculture he talks about how one set of genetics can not do both. If a plant is more productive in poor soil, it will be less productive in fertilie soil than a plant that has been bred to be very productive in fertile soil. (I need to go find that section of the book to talk about hybrids!)

So back to the small space/big space thing, small spaces would typically have higher fertility, gardeners prefer smaller plants, which means the plants that do well there are different than the ones I’m selecting for. Interesting.

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Not certain what’s limit for sparse foliage, low input or high yield, but I do have some tomatoes and peppers that do really well (considering other climate challenges) with only chicken manure mixed in early in the season and some hay for paths that decomposes for next season. In peppers I have made observation that that those with what I consider very sparse foliage had the best yield. Might be because only they had the time to grow their full yield potential whereas others might carry on making fruits for longer season. They seemed like they are a bit like determinate tomato. One sweet pepper had 8 big to medium fruits that had started about same time and after that there wasn’t more fruits or leaves growing. I gave it nickname hedgehog because those peppers were pointing in all directions. It was more pepper than leaf definetely. Not sure if it had negative affect on sweetness or flavour, but can’t be that picky here. Maybe I don’t want them with as sparse foliage, but determinate growth definetely something that is generelly missing in peppers.

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I’d say it’s mixed. I tend to leave plants in the ground over winter, so root mass is not something I have paid much attention to.

With that said, I have noticed that sprawling plants tend to have just one or two fruit in a dry garden situation, taking just as long to develop that fruit, while bush forms produce many smaller fruit that ripen more quickly.

I have seen zucchini with a massive root system and a tap root that broke off three feet down, and pumpkins that seemed to have a tiny root system that couldn’t support the plant. So I don’t know.

I suspect that all cucurbits have the potential for a tap root, but most go where the water is.

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In my garden, I tend to grow bush/semi-bush C. pepo for zucchinis and vining C. maxima for winter squash. I like both growth habits. I have room for some of both. I don’t think either is necessarily superior to the other. I find both yield similarly with the appropriate picking habits, but I suspect the overall weight of the zucchini harvest would be smaller than the pumpkin harvest if I were treating the zucchini like winter squash. However, I’ve not grown zucchini for marrows and so I can’t say for certain about that.

With vining squash, I tend to just drag the growing end of the vines where I want them to go early on. I can guide the vines across beds, along paths, loop them back on themselves, etc. You can also prune vining squash to a single vine like an indeterminate tomato. Another upside to vining plants is that you can literally grow them up if you’re inclined to trellis them or even just tie them to a post. Although if they have big fruit you’d need support for them.

Here’s a C. pepo mini pumpkin (grew from a dropped seed) that climbed up sunflowers and orach in a jungle-y corner of the garden. That little pumpkin was hanging about 3 feet off the ground.

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With the bush/semi-bush squash, I usually prune leaves periodically to make the growing fruit easier to spot and to keep them from crowding out the paths and their neighbors. They’re big plants too, just more concentrated.

I guess I think of their growth habits as sprawling without crowding (vine type) and crowding without sprawling (bush type). I find it easier to interplant around the sprawling vines than around a big ol’ bush. I do plant both types at the same spacing.

But then there’s dealing with the yields themselves…

A few days after taking this picture I had over 50 pounds of zucchini that I gave to my family. I was already putting it in everything I cooked. Yes really, including grating it into a strawberry tart. Plus giving the extra big ones to the chickens and I still couldn’t keep up with it at all. It was causing a good bit of stress trying to not let it go to waste.

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But I also had about the same amount in overall weight of winter squash, just with far fewer fruits. Significantly less stress in the kitchen!

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Yeah, my solution to not being able to keep up with my spaghetti zucchini harvest last year was to go, “Well, they have harder rinds than usual because of the spaghetti squash genetics. Let’s see what their shelf life is!” And then they turned into marrows for me off the plant. And I still haven’t eaten them all, and the ones I haven’t eaten are still hard as a rock six months later. I like these genetics! :smiley:

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Okay, that is a fascinating point I hadn’t considered at all.

You’re right, gardeners will very small growing spaces can often afford to make the soil very fertile, and most are actively trying to. I certainly am. The soil (a.k.a. sand) in my garden beds was light brown two years ago. It’s now almost black. I’ve been burying everything compostable I can get my hands on into my garden beds. I’ve found that the more kitchen scraps, diaper fluff, autumn leaves, urine, twigs, and everything else I pour into holes in my garden beds, the more I can get away with overcrowding my garden beds. And therefore I get higher yields within my limitations.

In fact, high soil fertility is important to me for another reason: water is a scarce resource for me, too. Fertilizer’s easy. It’s always abundantly available for free in a sustainable way. But water? Water is precious and needs to be used sparingly.

I’ve read that having more fertilizer available in the soil enhances plants’ drought tolerance. I’ve also read that high soil organic matter also holds more water in the soil. Therefore, burying loads of compostable material in my garden beds is essential for two reasons that will enhance drought tolerance.

That means I’ll probably end up breeding for plants that require high fertilizer inputs, by default, in order to select for plants that don’t mind being tightly crowded and having very little water. There are always tradeoffs, so that’s probably a tradeoff I’ll be making.

That’s really useful to know!

It’s a tradeoff I’m okay with. That shouldn’t be a problem for me long-term, because it’s sustainable for my climate and land and habits as a gardener to keep putting loads of compostable material into my garden beds all the time. But if for some reason that ever changes, I now know to expect that I’ll need to give up something else that matters to me.

This is such a striking example of the principle: “When you optimize for one thing, you are not optimizing for another thing.” Or as the Bible puts it, “No man can serve two masters.”

Until now, it hadn’t occurred to me that landraces optimized for small spaces and landraces optimized for low fertilizer needs might actually be opposites. Now that you’ve pointed it out, it seems very likely. Wow.

Yeah. Landrace gardening is all about sustainability, and what’s sustainable for one person might be unsustainable for another. Even something like plant fertilizer needs. How fascinating.

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Yes, this discussion has certainly given me some food for thought for some of the things that I might have written about low inputs in the lesson or in the ‘principles’ and need to change. Like keep the natural selection parts but perhaps remove the ‘low input’ language for especially for soil fertility. This is one way where the definition of ‘landrace’ can evolve-- when people talk about landraces in the traditional sense it’s about farmers and extensive field conditions where pretty much everybody is adapting to low input conditions. But the modern definition should be more inclusive to include people growing in pots on the terrace and in tiny gardens, raised beds, etc. Joseph has always said that, but I think I put my own flavor in some of the writing that was influenced by more traditional language for landraces. So I finally (more clearly) see the error of my ways!

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My personal style is for low-input. I can’t afford the labor, nor the materials to be bringing things into my garden, and applying them.

On a philosophical level, if I am importing things into my garden, I am stealing fertility from the rest of the ecosystem, turning it into desert.

If I bring in materials, I am making my garden less resilient, because it becomes dependent on the foreign substances, and the supply chains that bring them to my garden.

One of the biggest gardening problems that I see locally is people bringing composts, wood chips, and manures into their gardens which damage the garden. I’d guess due to herbicide toxicity.

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ya, that’s one of the main things that drives me to making my own landraces. Bringing in other crops you have to add fertilization, but if I make landraces that do awesome with what’s here then all I need to bring in are my own inputs (left overs from plants, leaves, etc) and the garden can run as its own ecosystem. Now it’s losing at least a little fertilization every time we eat something, but bringing in a little bit of outside fertilization isn’t so bad.

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Yes, that’s my biggest concern about importing fertility, such as taking my neighbor’s leaves and grass clippings and asking for wood chips.

However, since those things are being thrown away anyway, and it’s much worse for them to go nowhere useful., at least I can improve the neighborhood by reusing them on my land, rather than letting them get buried with a bunch of noncompostable materials in a polluted landfill.

If the time comes when people in my neighborhood need to grow their own food, and they start to regret giving up all that soil fertility over the decades, and I’m able to grow food that they can’t because that fertility ended up on my land, that means I’ll be empowered to give that fertility back to them in the form of food they can eat. Which is one of my long-term hopes. I take grass clippings today; I give them apples tomorrow. Everyone wins.

Nitrogen is particularly intriguing because animals extract it by breathing, and then get rid of it in a form plants can use. That means, as long as we’re giving our urine to our plants that feed us, we’re filling a similar role to endophytes. We’re giving them nitrogen from the air that wouldn’t otherwise be in the soil. They feed me, I feed them, they feed me, I feed them, back and forth. It’s a wonderful cycle.

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Yup. The relationships get really complex, and messy.

Iowa exports soil fertility, in the form of hay, to feed the dairy herds of the Snake River Plain in Idaho. The Idaho farmers keep the bulk of it, sending a small portion, in the form of cheese and beef to California. Some of it is exported in the form of potatoes. If those industrialized distribution systems ever stop working, the Idaho farmers will be sitting pretty on a whole heap of soil fertility.

I used to tell people, “No, you can’t buy my corn stalks for fall decorations, but you may ‘borrow’ them if you return them”. But people would steal next year’s soil fertility, instead of returning it. Therefore, I no longer allow people to borrow corn stalks.

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That makes perfect sense! It’s important to think in terms of sustainability. :slight_smile:

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Half an acre is small space?

With 10 plants, you can have 10 different varieties. I prefer to eat 10 different squash instead of just one. More genetic diversity there too…

It happen to me with the size of the harvest too. I prefer to have 3 medium size tomatoes instead of 1 big one. Or 3 small squash instead a very big one. Not so much for the diversity but for the easiness of eating or store. For example, 1 big squash we usually do not eat it in one seating, maybe half of it is left on the fridge occupying precious shelving space. And in the end getting bored of it and give it to the chickens.

When you find a big tomato full of bugs instead of one smaller the agony is not the same.

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At the allotment, I grow my squashes on compost heaps, which gives them lots of space to ramble. Sometimes I’ll let them climb a trellis, too. Each pallet-bay sized heap gets two or three plants.

I like medium-sized fruits that store well and taste good; I also like having lots of leaves and stalks to compost at the end of the season. (I’m not necessarily making compost for the fertility, so much as to literally raise the level of the plot. The site is a former water-meadow, but the river it drained to was moved and the hydrology is… a bit messed up. Heavy clay goes anaerobic pretty fast in flood conditions, and the water isn’t coming from the rain and draining off, so it’s not really a matter of having more drainage: I need to get the surface of the soil further away from the water table, without creating an environment that will be impossible to manage during drought years. That means increasing organic matter, and composting is the best way for me to do this. Last winter I had five bays with compost in them.

Some of my “sprawls everywhere” maxima squashes seem to yield pretty well in these conditions: we had seven decent-sized Marina di Chioggia off of one plant this year.

Incidentally, when I grew a Blue Banana squash in a container in my back garden (sheltered, suntrap, and I was able to make sure it got enough water) it produced only one squash but that squash tasted absolutely amazing. But growing the same variety at the allotment has been really unsuccessful: it didn’t fruit successfully in the greenhouse (too hot I guess? or maybe it’s an obligate outcrosser, like tomatillos, and I only had one plant), and when I’ve tried it outdoors it responded very badly to transplanting and didn’t produce well and the squash was only okay-ish. I’m going to try direct sowing it in 2024, and giving it some wind protection early on, as I think the wind might have previously contributed to the transplant shock and a number of my squashes seem to do better with some wind protection.

At the Soup Garden, however, I avoid the large vining squashes because of space constraints: where we do have decent amounts of space, it’s quite shady, and the sunny areas are all places people need to be able to get through in a wheelchair (without destroying plants). The soil is very poor there (if I attempt to dig very far I run into rubble from when they knocked the old church down), so the “bush” varieties don’t really do much better. I have resorted to building a low mound for half-finished compost in a part of the churchyard that is seldom used, and will try my most productive courgette from last year on that.

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It can be, depending on the number of people who need to be fed from that land. For one person, it’s a big growing space. For a family of ten, it’s small. For a person wanting to sell produce to their community, it’s small.

But yes, you’re absolutely right that there are many people working with much smaller growing spaces. I have about a tenth of an acre to work with, personally, and there are many people who have far less.

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This is fascinating.

I’m definitely in the “low-space/high input” quadrant, although another consideration is that required/useful outside inputs tend to go down pretty dramatically as you are able to cycle more productive biomatter within your own systems.

I’m on a sixteenth of an acre in an urban core. Most of that is house. What isnt house came to me fully paved, pavered and gravelled over. The previous homeowners here hated nature and all things green :unamused: No landrace of anything would have survived the flat concrete slab I had to work with - so my first order of business was bringing in truckloads of organic matter and just plain soil. Also my second order of business. And third.

But 5 years in, I have beautiful soil. It gets topped up from home compost, woodshop shavings, leaves and coffee grounds. I divert the neighbours grass clippings from municipal waste collection sometimes, and start seedlings indoors with extra amendments, but at this point I’m not adding much on a regular basis.

After filling every available square inch of my own land with raised beds, dug out beds, containers, spilling out planting space from windows and planting into the sidewalk hellstrip, my gardens have now colonized other parts of the neighbourhood.

Most of my growing space is now in an (unofficial) “community garden extension” in a neighbour’s backyard down the street, where I just expanded to a 25’x25’ garden plot plus free reign to play in the berry bushes and perennial/herb border. That space feels massive to me but it’s still microscopic compared to some. The soil there is actually pretty great, but I’m still trucking in composted manure and orchard hay from nearby farms to heap on there because a) we’re still talking a whopping couple hundred bucks this year and far less in future and b) then I can realistically grow enough to be 90% self sufficient in vegetables (household of 2) , which feels amazing in a dense urban neighbourhood.

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