Q. A few years ago I changed my old garden to raised beds. My problem is that plants like onions, carrots, beets (root plants) have extra tall tops but the vegetables are small like the size of a golf ball. I have good results with top-of-the-ground veggies – peas, pole beans, cukes, etc. Thanks for any advice you can give me. – Warren J. Pelletier, Caribou

A. Many thanks to Mr. Pelletier for leading me down a road yet traveled in this column: raised-bed gardening. I’ll use this opportunity to discuss his specific problem and follow with another column or two on the numerous benefits of raised beds.

I found Warren’s note in last Friday’s mail and had him on the phone Saturday morning, knowing there was a need for more information before this mystery would be solved. My first guess was too much nitrogen pushing growth of foliage at the expense of food storage in roots and bulbs, but Warren laid this theory to rest when he told me that he rarely used any fertilizer.

He told me that he had been gardening in his two raised beds, each 4 feet by 10 feet, for eight years now. Made of cedar planks, each bed is about 12 inches deep. He constructed the beds on top of the old garden site and filled them with the old garden’s soil. Every year he digs in compost and only occasionally applies a little fertilizer. It seemed to me that Warren was doing everything right.

Somewhere in our conversation about raised-bed gardening, Warren mentioned that he thought the space between plants might be a bit too close, explaining that he followed the in-row spacing recommended on the seed packet but that his rows were very close together. My thoughts immediately turned to Lynne’s bed of turnips, those she grew this summer for her Plant-a-Row project.

I encouraged Lynne to broadcast the turnip seed over the entire width of the bed with plans of thinning to a proper spacing as the plants developed. While most of the bed was properly thinned, rain and summer camps interrupted the work and a corner of the bed was never thinned. Under intense competition, the turnip plants in the crowded section grew tall and leggy, but their roots never grew larger than golf balls.

A virtue of raised-bed gardening is intensive use of space – the idea of growing more in less space led Warren and many others to this form of gardening. While only about 32 percent of total garden space is used for plants in the conventional garden, a full 63 percent of raised bed space is used for plants. Still, I suspect there is a limit. Perhaps the root crops need a little more room.

With this new theory in mind, I checked an excellent reference on intensive gardening, “High-Yield Gardening” by Marjorie Hunt and Brenda Bortz (1986, Rodale Press, ISBN 0-87857-599-5), for recommended spacing between plants of root crops in raised beds. (This may be one of those out-of-print books found only in used-book stores or online.) The ranges shown for each crop (see sidebar) represent variety differences in root (or bulb) size; if unsure, use the greater spacing.

Warren, I hope this helps as you make your gardening plans for next year!

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to reesermanley@shead.org. Include name, address and telephone number.

Recommended spacing

for some root crops

. Beets: 2-6 inches

. Carrots: 2-3 inches

. Garlic: 2-6 inches

. Kohlrabi: 6-9 inches

. Leeks: 2-6 inches

. Onions: 4-6 inches

. Radishes: 2-3 inches

. Turnips: 4-6 inches