Hello from the UK

Hi, I am based in the UK. I have taken over an allotment and have raised beds.  I want to plant these to best utilise the space, so looking at square foot gardening.  I want to plant Broad Beans how much space do you have to leave between rows.  Thankyou.

Hello Roni55 and welcome to the Square Foot Gardening Forum!

Square Foot Gardening follows the concepts for gardening laid out by Mel Bartholomew which includes several key principles. One of those principles is ... no rows! Everything is planted in squares. Square foot actually, probably because square 3 Decimeter Gardening doesn't have the same ring   . You can learn more about SFG in the book All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition . 

Anyway, for beans, Mel suggests that you can put 9 bush beans per square foot or 8 for pole beans. If you have space for a trellis on the north side of your beds that's a good place for beans of the climbing type.

There's lots of people here with a great deal of gardening experience, and I'm sure some of them will be long shortly with other suggestions, questions, and recommendations.

Until then, have fun and happy gardening!

Hi Roni, Welcome to the Forum from California, U.S. Congratulations on your allotment. How big are the beds? I had to research growing broad beans to see if their plant spacing is the same for green beans. It looks like they need a bit more growing room. One per square foot up to 4 per square foot. ?? just to give you a visual, SFG calls for broccoli and cauliflower to be planted 1/sq ft. If you can get hold of the 2nd or 3rd Edition of ALL NEW Square Foot Gardening it will be a big help in transitioning the dirt beds into something closer to Mel's Mix, which uses 2" of well composted materials per 6". No dirt is used in Mel's Mix. The other 2 parts are 2" of fluffed peat moss and 2" of coarse vermiculite. Obviously the compost is the most important part as it is what feeds the plants instead of fertilizer. Just a caution, the spacing of plants is for SFG which is an intense spacing method using Mel's Mix. The main thing is to not think in rows again, but to visualize each square foot as a mini-garden, multiplied by the number of squares. Also, no walking in the beds!

roni55 wrote:Hi, I am based in the UK. I have taken over an allotment and have raised beds.  I want to plant these to best utilise the space, so looking at square foot gardening.  I want to plant Broad Beans how much space do you have to leave between rows.  Thankyou.

Check out these videos.  I remember reading about this guy planting broad beans.  In google type in -  no dig gardening charles dowding fava beans.

I also just reread a few articles and videos.  I usually grow Aquadulce Fava Beans.  I just did some searching online.  Some videos show 6 inches apart and some show 9 inches apart.  So to convert the "thin to" on a package of seeds, use this formula to determine  how many to plant in a square if nobody knows other wise.

    (12 divided by thin to spacing on package ) squared.  

So if package says thin to 6 inches then 12/6 = 2 * 2 = 4 per square. 
or 
So if package says thin to 9 inches then 12/9 = 1.33 * 1.33 = 1.77 or 2 per square.  

So experiment.  I usually plant Aquadulce and usually plant 2,3 or 4 per square depending on a number of factors.  Usually 2 per square because my garden does not get enough sun in the winter and I want each plant to get as much sun as possible.

Here is my planting this year.  I did not use Aquadulce because I thought i had seed but really didn't.  So I bought the only ones sold in the local nursery.  Can't remember the name.  I more or less used double row spacing here because I did not want to over plant.  This bed was filled with weeds before I cleaned it and I needed to keep an eye on the weeds sprouting so the bed would be ready to plant in the spring.