Just as in your garden, everything in grove.eco starts with a piece of ground that gets a structure. Beds are created. Depending on the layout of your garden these may be several small beds or perhaps just one large bed – especially if you are growing with companion planting after Gertrud Franck, for example.
There are currently three different types of bed available. All three use row companion planting. This means that rows are laid out at a certain spacing and one plant is usually grown along the entire row.
Row companion planting has several advantages. The greatest is probably that good neighbours in an entire row benefit from one another. For example, a row of carrots at about 30 cm spacing from a row of onions. Every carrot then has a nearby onion to deter the carrot fly, and every onion has a carrot to deter the onion fly. Perfect. If both were grown in separate square patches, the outermost plants might no longer be protected. A further advantage is crop rotation. With defined rows it is easier to keep track over the years of what has already grown in a given row, compared to constantly changing areas within a bed.
Understanding the different companion planting systems is just as important as understanding the features of grove.eco. There are separate pages explaining these. At the moment it is possible to create the following types of bed in grove.eco:
For row companion planting beds, grove.eco uses a side-on view – just as many books on row companion planting do. Here is an explanation.
Row companion planting is better suited to larger gardens. For planning smaller areas or raised beds, methods such as Square Foot Gardening or individual patches are more appropriate. Grove.eco does not currently support these methods (yet).
Further types of bed are planned. These include Square Foot (the bed is divided into small squares) and, for larger areas, track-width beds for tractors (often found in organic market gardens and community-supported agriculture schemes).
If you were asked to draw a bed plan, most people would probably draw it from above. That's what we're used to – from maps or building plans. That works fine when you want to place plants freely across the bed, for …
{{< img src="hilfe_beete_aktionen.png" alt="Actions \"Year change\" and \"Create new bed\"" side="left" >}} Select **"Beds"** in the left navigation. Then click **"Create new bed"** at the top right. A dialogue for the …
## Opening a bed {{< img src="hilfe_beete_navigation.png" alt="grove navigation showing several beds" width="500" side="right" >}} Once you've created a bed, it appears in the overview. Just click anywhere on the bed – …
The year change is how you start your new growing season in grove. Your existing beds from the previous year are **carried over into the new year – including all plantings**. So you don't have to start from scratch and …