Spacing in beds

[Big Al]

Sorry not going to be much help as this is my first "proper" year at self suff in the fruit and veg garden [ seasonal and home grown produce... sod the banana trials] but I will be using every spare inch of land and noting the results. My idea is that the seed companies want you to experience perfect F&V so they give the optimum space, water, feed requirments etc so you get good crops and go back and buy more seeds next year. My plan is likely to include massive feeding and intense raising of food crops in my 4 raised beds of 4.8m x 1.2m. I'll let you know how I get on.

I look forward to hearing how you get on with this. I experimented with this type of thing to start with, by plating in "grids" rather than rows.
Some things it worked well for (leeks in particular and the Chard I planted went crazy), but other things seemed to flop, but I don't know if that's the soil I used or what.

I followed the directions on the packs and my veggies seemed to be spaced a lot further apart than most of the veg I saw on allotments or in shiny books.
I didn't thin plants out so much last year and beetroots seemed to work as well as they ever had, I had "clumps" of them growing in fact. I take the view that nature would be able to work round whatever clever system I had, and if there were too many plants in a small space, the weaker ones would fizzle out.

I have a book somewhere called the no dig, no weed method and I treat it as a bible at the time of my last foray into deep beds. I remember it was enthusing the ideals of close planting and I remember planting onions on the grid method spacing the sets at 4" apart in a row then the next row was ofset by 4" so it looked like a diamond pattern. I'm also going to try the sweetcorn, beans and corgettes method that Andy mentioned here that was first done by the native americans I believe where you plant the sweetcorn then the beans grow up the stalks and the courgettes provide ground cover.