Just as in your garden, everything in grove 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 four different types of bed. Free bed planning and three row companion planting systems.

Free beds

With a free bed, plants can be placed completely freely anywhere on the bed. Rows do still form within the planting, but you can set their direction and spacing as you like. Planning is done from a top-down view, as if you were looking at a map.

Free beds are better suited to smaller gardens, where they allow more plants to fit in the available bed space.

One advantage of free beds is that you can, for example, spread individual large plants across the bed while still laying out the smaller plants in rows. The downside is that you give up the integrated crop rotation built into the Gertrud Franck and Langerhorst family systems.

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 when good neighbours are grown in a row or in rows side by side, every plant benefits from the positive qualities of its partner. Take a row of carrots at about 30 cm spacing from a row of onions: every carrot has a nearby onion to deter the carrot fly, and every onion has a carrot to deter the onion fly. Perfect.

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. In the Gertrud Franck and Langerhorst family systems, crop rotation is already built into the system and does not need to be planned separately.

Row companion planting systems supported by grove

With row companion planting we draw on knowledge that pioneers of companion planting developed over many years. Understanding how these systems work is just as important as understanding the features of grove.eco. There are separate pages explaining each one. At the moment it is possible to create the following types of row companion planting bed in grove:

Row companion planting on beds Here the garden is divided into several rather narrow beds. Typical widths are between 80 cm and about 120 cm, usually separated by paths. It does not matter whether they are next to each other or dotted around the garden. The row spacing is determined individually by the spacing requirements of the plants being grown. At the turn of the year, plantings are usually moved from one bed to the next, which is how crop rotation is organised. More information here: Row companion planting on beds after Sister Christa Weinrich
Row companion planting after Gertrud Franck This is a more complex and refined system. The entire garden is usually laid out as one large bed. The rows have a fixed width, regardless of what is being grown in them. At the turn of the year the rows are simply shifted across the bed. More information here: Row companion planting after Gertrud Franck
Row companion planting after the Langerhorst family This is a further development of the Gertrud Franck system. The main difference is paths of clover after every third row and correspondingly closer planting. More information here: Row companion planting after the Langerhorst family

How row companion planting is displayed

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.

Are more bed types planned?

Yes, further bed types are already planned:

Square Foot Gardening: the bed is divided into small squares, each planted with a set number of plants.
For larger areas, track-width beds for tractors (often found in organic market gardens and community-supported agriculture schemes) are planned.