How to Organize and Plan Your Garden with Twine and Stakes

Are you expanding your vegetable garden this year? As our economical outlook continues to look bleak, many of us are enlarging our vegetable gardens in order to save even more money at the grocery store. To make the most out of all that extra garden space, organizing the beds with twine or string and stakes is a great way to keep those vegetables straight.

1. Twine and stakes helps to divide a garden into easy to work sections. One of the more traditional uses for twine and stakes is to create workable divisions within the garden plot. Dividing the garden into specific beds for each type of vegetable tends to improve efficiency and production while eliminating unused space. And, knowing ahead of time how much room is available for a specific crop helps a gardener in determining how many seeds or bulbs must be purchased.

This divisional method of gardening called "square foot gardening" in which everything has its place and no space is wasted.

2. Twine helps to section off areas of the garden for seasonal plantings. To get the most out of a garden, vegetables should be planted in the spring, summer, and fall. Stakes and twine helps to separate out areas to be set aside for rotating crops.

3. Stakes can keep track of successive plantings. To produce a continual supply of fresh vegetables over the entire growing seasons, plantings are usually staggered. Staggering the planting prevents everything from ripening at once. For example with corn, I'll plant each row 10 days later than the previous row for a 40 day supply of fresh corn on the cob. The stakes help me keep track of where I've planted the last batch of seed and helps avoid accidental overcrowding.

4. Stakes and twine can be used to built tepees for climbing bush peas or beans. Bush peas and bush beans are called that because they only grow to heights of 2 feet, rather than the 6-8 feet typically found in pole varieties. Bush peas and beans still have to be trellised however, to prevent wasting valuable garden space. Garden stakes and twine can also be used to built efficient gardening tepees; here's a link showing how it can be done.

5. Stakes and twine prevent accidentally stepping on top of a planted bed. It's easy to lose one's place when sowing vegetable seeds and inadvertently stepping on a newly planted bed. Sectioning off areas before planting those vegetable seeds provides a visual cue of "Keep out!" which prevents you and the kids from compacting seeds deep into the ground with your shoes.