We recently added another garden bed and it’s for one thing and one thing only: our tiny green growers! They’ll be in charge of deciding what they want in the garden, planting, harvesting, watering, and everything else that comes with gardening.
Don’t get me wrong, our kiddos help with the entire garden but they don’t get much of a say as far as planning goes. Not the case with this bed… they’ll be doing it all! Big Man has decided he wants a “rainbow garden with all of the colors!”
Rainbow garden it is.
Plants He’s Chosen:
Red- Micro Tom tomatoes & mignonette alpine strawberries
Orange- new kuroda carrots & doe hill peppers
Yellow- solar yellow carrots
Green- basil, bush beans, collard greens
Blue- borage, blue cream berries tomato
Purple- blauhilde pole beans, eggplant, opal basil
Layout
For reference- this is going in a 3 foot x 6.5 foot bed that backs up to our deck. We’ll plant in height and rainbow order with the tallest (and purple) plants in the back and the shortest plants in the front of the bed. A trellis in the back of the bed will help the tall tomatoes and pole beans climb.
The bed will be somewhere between square foot gardening and heavy interplanting like the rest of our garden beds. We like to give everything the room it needs to grow while also maximizing the amount of delicious food that will come out of it.
Each square below represents a square foot. Not pictured: trellis supports for the eggplants and peppers. Eggplants and peppers will have one bamboo stake that we’ll tie the main stem to. The indeterminate tomatoes and pole beans will climb up the back and we’ll tie the tomatoes to the trellis, giving the eggplant plenty of space and light needed to grow!
When we go to plant beans, I’ll bring some yellow bush beans as well and see if the boys want to plant some behind the carrots. Bush beans can be tucked almost anywhere and make a great neighbor to carrots.
Bush beans will be succession sown in the bed throughout the growing season. Bush beans can be placed along garden bed edges, too. They drape over the sides, saving you some space on the inside of the bed. It’s one of my favorite hacks for growing more in a smaller area!
Larger plants like tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers all need a good amount of space so they’ll each get about a square foot assigned to them. The micro tomatoes don’t need as much space as they only grow to about 9 inches tall. If Big Man wants to add more color to the garden, we may end up throwing some Kyoto red carrots around them. His call, though!
Alpine strawberries are great for a raised bed like this one because they don’t send off runners. The plant you plant is what you get. They fruit all summer long and are the perfect toddler garden snack! They should survive for about 4 years with proper care.
Companions
I like to take companions into consideration when planning a garden space. Since our toddler chose the plants, there’s a good chance he wasn’t thinking about this but he did a great job selecting some for this bed even if he didn’t intend to!
Basil– if left to flower attracts bees. The scent repels thrips and can throw off the tomato hornworm moth. Basil and tomatoes are a perfect pair in the kitchen so it just makes sense that they’d be a perfect pair in the garden, too!
Borage– attracts beneficial insects like bees and parasitic wasps. Bees come for the borage and stay to pollinate the other plants. Borage flowers are edible and taste like cucumber. Yum!
Beans– (bush and pole) improve soil by making nitrogen available to surrounding plants. Bush beans can act as a living mulch, shading out the ground below them and helping to retain water.
Seasonal Changes
Since this summer garden bed is heavy with tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, we’ll want to switch it up next season. Brassicas and legumes would be my suggestion to our tiny humans for next summer’s garden bed. If they’re still wanting a rainbow bed, there are plenty of rainbow mixes to add that don’t fall into the tomato family but are a little more exciting than legumes. Rainbow chard, multicolor radishes, multicolor beets, and multicolor carrots would all do fine following tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. The following summer we can add tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers back to the bed.
Rotating crops on a yearly basis reduces pests and diseases. Planting tomatoes over and over in the same bed not only robs the soil of nutrients but also increases the chances your next crop will succumb to disease or pest pressure. Pests can overwinter in the soil underneath your plants and if what they munched on prior to their long winter nap is above ground when they wake up, good luck!
Once this summer’s plants have died out, we’ll add some fall crops to bring nutrients back to the soil and cover crops to maintain the soil. Big Man is focused on his special summer garden and won’t choose fall plants until sometime in June. While it won’t be on his radar for a while… I’ve already got some ideas of what seed packets I’ll have him choose from.
Fall Rainbow Options
Red- carrots, radishes, beets, cardinal chard, & flamingo chard
Orange- oriole chard &carrots
Yellow- solar yellow carrots & golden beets
Green- leeks, salad greens, mustard greens, kale, cabbage, broccoli, romanesco, Brussels sprouts, spinach, fava beans, & arugula
Blue- pansies, violas, & dazzling blue kale
Purple- purple Vienna kohlrabi, red express cabbage, red bull Brussels sprouts, scarlet kale, red giant mustard greens, merlot lettuce, red oak leaf lettuce, violas, pansies, red scallions, & sugar magnolia tendril peas
Multicolor options- chard, beets, carrots, radishes
Plenty of fall crops can overwinter in the garden and provide us with some fun rainbow winter harvests. As we get closer to it, we’ll map out a formal plan for the fall and winter children’s garden.
Plants like carrots, leeks, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts will overwinter here without coverings while some may benefit from coverings like spinach, mustard greens, lettuces, and kale.
Now it’s time to fill the bed so we can get to planting carrots and collard greens. Rainbow garden bed, here we come!
Happy (rainbow) growing!
Bridget
