How to Plan a Polyculture Garden: 5 Steps to Grow Your Own

Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s something romantic about polyculture gardens, with all the different colors and textures spilling over the edges, insects flying from flower to flower, and that wildness, just barely kept tame. I’m here today to teach you, step by step, how to plan a polyculture garden, full of veggies, herbs, and edible flowers.

It’s common enough to see flowers and perennials grown in polycultures, but what about annual polyculture veggie gardens? Do they even make sense?

I bet you can guess that my answer is “yes.” All of the benefits of growing plants in polycultures hold true for veggie gardens, too.

I list the benefits as well as drawbacks of polyculture further down in the post. But in short, the reason to grow in polycultures is to reap the benefits nature has to offer from plant communities. These benefits simply aren’t present in monoculture systems. They stem from the diversity of the community and countless beneficial relationships between plants.

Why Isn’t Everyone Growing in Polycultures?

Permaculture people like to tout polyculture as being leagues better than monoculture. Yet there are loads of permaculture people growing their gardens in neat—monoculture—rows. If polyculture gardens are so great, then why do we see so many permaculture professionals still planting their gardens in single-crop rows? 

I think it’s due to a lack of accessible information on how to grow polyculture gardens.

Granted, polycultures may be impractical for commercial farms and market gardens. Gardens of that scale are labor-intensive, and I can see why keeping to single-crop rows is easier to manage.

Polycultures in the Home Garden

But what about home-scale gardens? Gardens of this size, intended to feed a single family, can easily be grown as polycultures. So, why is so little information available on planning polyculture gardens for the backyard garden or homestead?  

It’s time to change this lack of information and start experimenting and growing our own knowledge base. I know a little bit about polyculture gardening. Granted, mostly from devouring books on permaculture, but I do have experience practicing what I’ve learned from those books.

So if you’re interested in growing a polyculture garden bed this year, stick around because this post is all about designing, planning, and growing polycultures!

In This Post

Below I’ll cover what a polyculture is and how it differs from related gardening methods. Then I’ll go over some benefits and drawbacks of polyculture gardening, to help you decide if polyculture gardening is really right for you.

Next, we’ll sink our teeth into polyculture garden design with a tried and true example, Ianto Evan’s Polyculture. Finally, I’ll tell you about my polyculture design process and share what I’m planning for my polyculture garden this year.

Let’s dig in.

Polyculture vs. Interplanting vs. Companion Planting vs. Guilds

These are all similar terms, occasionally used interchangeably, but they are distinct methods of growing. 

Both interplanting and companion planting can be considered types of polyculture, in that they involve growing different species together, as opposed to entire rows of a single species. Although technically polyculture, they often resemble monoculture more closely than full-blown polyculture systems. They may have two or three plants growing together, but still be relatively low-diversity systems arranged in neat, well-weeded rows.

Even so, both of these basic forms of polyculture can be good gateways into polyculture gardening for those who are overwhelmed by the prospect of planning a full polyculture bed. 

Interplanting

Interplanting, or intercropping, is a method that aims to maximize resources by planting two or more different species together. By selecting species that fill different physical spaces, there is little competition for sunlight and nutrients. An example is planting cabbage, onions, and carrots together. These three crops all have different habits and so occupy different physical spaces, both above and below ground, even when planted densely. 

Another example of interplanting is peas and cucumbers. Although both these plants occupy similar physical space, they grow at different times. Peas and cucumbers can grow on the same trellis, peas taking the first turn, then making way for sun-loving cucumbers when the summer heat becomes too much. This duo has the added benefit that the peas fix nitrogen which will become available to the cucumbers when the peas die back. Now we’re getting into companion planting territory.

Companion Planting

Companion planting is less about reducing competition for resources, and more about how plants can benefit each other. Usually, one of the plants is the main crop, and companion plants are chosen to support it. Sometimes companion plants are mutually beneficial.

A common companion plant pairing is basil and tomatoes because basil repels common tomato pests. And, of course, basil and tomatoes complement each other on the dinner plate, too.

Another common companion plant is the marigold, which can repel many pests, making it, in theory, a good companion for most vegetables. 

Plant Guilds

Also forms of polyculture, guilds are cultivated groupings of plants designed after natural plant communities, striving for the same level of diversity and complexity that sustains natural ecosystems.

The classic guild in permaculture is a fruit tree guild, but guilds can take many forms. One of the oldest known guilds is the three sisters guild of corn, beans, and squash. This grouping is a true guild, not just companion planting or interplanting because all three species support each other, and each plant fills in a different niche of space, reducing competition for resources. The corn acts as a trellis to physically support the beans. The beans fix nitrogen to feed the corn and squash, and the squash grows low and wide creating a groundcover to shade the soil, hold in moisture, and keep out weeds. This guild might also be called a polyculture.

Polyculture vs Guilds

Typically, guilds are composed of mostly perennial plants with some annuals speckled in for good measure, as in a fruit tree guild. While polyculture brings up images of wild-like annual vegetable and flower beds with a perennial shrub or herb here and there. The difference is partly semantics, but I think it’s a useful distinction. 

Polyculture

Polyculture combines the best of both interplanting and companion planting to create ecological gardens. The result is diverse garden plant communities that are resistant to pests, highly productive, and can provide food for nearly the entire growing season.

Polyculture Garden Benefits and Drawbacks

Now that we’ve established what is meant by polyculture vs. other related terms, let’s talk about why you might want to grow your veggies in a polyculture and why you might not want to.

Polyculture Benefits

• Efficient use of resources: space, water, sunlight, nutrients
• Plants support each other by repelling pests, fixing nitrogen, providing shade, and creating microclimates, among many other things
• High diversity increases the resiliency of the garden
• High diversity confuses pests
• Visually appealing layers of color and texture
• Dense planting means minimal weeding
• Higher yield per area than if the same plants were grown in separate monoculture beds
• Long harvest period, from early spring to late summer and early autumn. In mild climates, winters can be productive, too.

Polyculture Drawbacks

With all of those benefits, why doesn’t every gardener plant polycultures? Polyculture does have some disadvantages. Here are some reasons you might choose not to grow polyculture gardens.

• Their inherent complexity makes them less straightforward to understand and implement than rows of single plants.
• There isn’t a lot of information available for different plant combinations that have been proven to work.
• Subsequently, developing polyculture garden beds may require experimentation to find designs that work well for different plant groupings and climates.
• Scaling to farm or even market garden scales requires different methods for planting and harvesting than traditional equipment has to offer.
• Requires a different mindset and approach to gardening, which may be difficult for some gardeners to adjust to.

Polyculture Garden Design

There are about as many different ways to create a polyculture garden as there are gardeners growing them, maybe more. In this post, I cover the approach discussed in Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden because it is the most in-depth and detailed explanation of polyculture gardening I’ve found.

Ianto Evan’s Polyculture

Here’s an example from the book that might help you to plan your own polyculture garden. It won’t necessarily work to directly copy this one, but it might, depending on where you live. I believe this polyculture was developed for the West Coast of the United States. Try it out or use it as a starting point and modify it for your own garden. I’ve put it into my own words and shortened the description considerably for this post. More details can be found in Gaia’s Garden.

The Plants Used in Ianto’s Polyculture

• Cabbage
• Radish
• Dill
• Parsnip
• Calendula
• Lettuce
• Bush beans
• Buckwheat
• Fava beans or garlic 

How to Grow Ianto’s Polyculture

• Start two weeks before the last frost date by starting the cabbage indoors.
• On week one (the last frost date) scatter the radish, dill, parsnip, calendula, and lettuce seeds to cover the whole bed at a density of about one seed every two square inches.
• By week four radishes should be getting big enough to harvest. Pull up some of them and plant the cabbage seedlings in the holes created.
• Around week six, start thinning out the lettuce to make room for the remaining lettuce to grow bigger
• In late spring to early summer, plant bush beans in the spaces left by continual thinning of the lettuce.
• When additional spaces open up, sow buckwheat, which can be thinned and eaten as it comes up similarly to the baby lettuce.
• Next, harvest the dill and calendula (the flowers are edible), followed by the early cabbages.
• In mid-summer, harvest the beans as they ripen.
• In mild climates, plant fava beans in early fall for a winter crop. For climates, plant garlic cloves for harvest the following spring.
• Parsnips will be ready to harvest in the fall and into winter. 

I hope the description of Ianto’s polyculture above gives you an idea of what is possible with polyculture gardens. Hemenway goes on to detail a more complex polyculture called “Jajarkot’s Advanced Polyculture,” which I have used as a framework to design my own polycultures.

Designing Your Own Polyculture

Even though polyculture gardening isn’t a new concept, the practice has largely been lost to the Western world until its (relatively) recent comeback in the 1980s. As a result, there aren’t many tried and true polyculture designs available, at least not with plants familiar and accessible to European and American gardeners. So, when you plan a polyculture garden, it may be necessary to do some experimentation to figure out what plant combinations and timing work best in your garden. 

How to Plan a Polyculture Garden (Based on Jajarkot’s Advanced Polyculture)

Here is a basic process for planning a polyculture garden that I have gleaned based on the examples and suggestions laid out in Gaia’s Garden. This is the process I used for planning the polyculture I’ll be growing this year, which I’ll share at the end of the post. 

Step 1. Choose your plants. 

Choose a mixture of early, mid, and late-season plants in order to keep your garden bed full and productive throughout the growing season. Pick roughly two or three from each category below (except the last bullet of plants to avoid), and feel free to try multiple varieties of each type you choose (just sow fewer of each variety to keep the planting density from getting too high).

• Edible groundcover – Choose some early plants that are quick to germinate such as radishes, mesclun lettuces, broccoli raab, mustards, and rocket (arugula). These will form a groundcover to keep out weeds and provide an early harvest of baby salad greens, followed by later harvests of progressively larger greens.
• Early-season – Include some other early-season crops such as broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage. Start these indoors and transplant them to the polyculture as space opens up from harvesting early salad greens.
• Mid-season – Consider including nitrogen-fixing beans and pest-repelling alliums such as onions and chives. Don’t forget root crops such as carrots and beets.
• Herbs and flowers – Choose some fragrant herbs and edible flowering plants to repel or confuse pests, such as dill, fennel, parsley, cilantro, and calendula.
• Late season – Include slow-growing fall and winter crops such as parsnip. Also, many of the early season crops can be planted again for a fall crop after the heat of the summer has passed, including broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, spinach, and lettuce.
• Plants to avoid – Think carefully about growing sprawling plants like tomatoes, squashes, and melons in a polyculture. These have a tendency to take over an area and will probably shade out other plants. If you want to grow these, put them in another part of the garden, and maybe train them up a trellis on the north (south in the southern hemisphere) end of your polyculture bed to save space. Of course, if you have a plan for how to integrate the sprawling nature of these plants into your design, as in the three sisters guild, then go ahead and include them.

Step 2. Plan It on Paper (or in a Spreadsheet)

Planning a polyculture garden starts on paper. With your plant list from Step 1 in hand, figure out when and how to sow each type of seed and record your plan. I planned out my polyculture on this seed-starting worksheet I made. It’s free to download when you sign up for my email list.

Determine a planting schedule based on the following information:

• Suggested planting times and methods on the seed packet
• Your average last frost date
• Plant growth rate (time to maturity)
• How you think the plants will interact with each other as they grow
• Expected harvest times
• How you will interact with the garden

This is where polyculture design gets difficult to plan compared to planting crops in rows, or even square-foot gardening.

The complexity of interactions between plants over the season can be difficult to wrap your head around. But give it a go. Take notes on what you do. If reality doesn’t work out the way you expected, you can always adjust the plan as you go and refine it for the following season.

Step 3. Plant Your Polyculture Garden

To prepare your beds, I recommend using a no-till method. You can use a standard raised bed, or build up a garden bed with sheet mulching like lasagna gardening. Build it in a raised bed or just in mounds on the ground.

Plan on about twenty to thirty square feet of garden bed per person to be fed.

Start any seedlings indoors that you want to give a headstart, according to your plan. I recently wrote a post on my indoor seed-starting setup. It covers the basic information you need to successfully start seed indoors.

When it’s time to sow the first seeds outside, remember not to sow too densely. Aim for about one seed for every two square inches. The idea is to eat every plant that comes up, so thinning equals harvesting. If you have too many sprouts come up all at once it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Due to the broadcast sowing method, you’ll need to pull back any mulch on the surface before planting. Broadcast the seeds then add a light layer of fine mulch material such as straw or leaf mold. This will protect the seeds and soil surface until the edible ground cover grows up to take over as a living mulch.

Step 4. Adapt as Your Polyculture Grows

As it grows, you may discover that your polyculture feels unbalanced, or isn’t doing quite what you expected. That’s okay. Adjust and adapt your plans as you go.

Don’t worry about getting everything perfect from the start. The process of harvesting and filling in the spaces will repeat throughout the season, so you’ll have time to make adjustments.

A polyculture garden is a living system. It will change, sometimes rapidly, over the growing season. Watch it daily, listen to what it tells you, and adapt based on the feedback you receive. Your interaction with your polyculture garden is just as important as the interactions between the plants within it.

My Polyculture Garden Design This Year

This year I’m planning a polyculture garden in a 4’x12′ no-till lasagna-style bed. One thing I’m doing differently from what most people will tell you to do with lasagna gardening is not putting down a cardboard weed barrier.

I’ve decided to omit the cardboard for two reasons, after listening to Morag Gamble’s method on Youtube. First, I want the plant roots to grow down into the native soil and not be stopped or redirected by the cardboard layer. Second, the soil surface is an important interface, and I want free communication between the soil microorganisms and my garden beds.

I’m not too worried about grass or other weeds coming up due to not having the cardboard barrier because my garden beds are built up quite thickly, at about twelve inches (thirty centimeters). Except maybe around the edges, I don’t think any grasses will make it through that much material without light.

Below are the plants I’ve included in my polyculture garden plan. I purchased most of the seeds for this polyculture from Botanical Interests (affiliate link). So far I’ve had great germination rates with their seeds. I also love that they provide so much information on their seed packets. It makes figuring out my planting plan that much easier. Some of the seed packets I’ve gotten elsewhere don’t have as much information and I’ve had to look it up elsewhere.

1. 6 Weeks before the First Frost Date

• Start the following seeds indoors or in a greenhouse.
• Six seedlings each of broccoli and kale
• Three seedlings each calendula and fennel
• These will be transplanted into open spaces from the first harvest, 18-24 inches apart.

2. Sow Seeds Outside (Lettuce, Mustards, Carrots & Herbs)

• 2-4 weeks before the last frost.
• Broadcast leafy greens including leaf lettuce, head lettuce, and mustards.
• Broadcast root vegetable seeds including, radish, carrot, and beet.
• Broadcast herbs including chives, cilantro, basil, and dill.
• Sow at a rate of about 1 seed per 2 square inches over the entire bed.
• The first baby greens will be ready for harvest at about the last frost date.

3. Late Spring to Early Summer

• Sow bush bean seeds (not pole beans).
• Press seeds into the soil in openings left from harvested greens.
• Space roughly 18-24″ apart.

4. 4 Months Before the First Frost Date

• Sow parsnips
• Direct seed in available spaces left from earlier harvests.

5. Re-Sow Shoulder Season Crops

• Up until 10 weeks before the first frost date: Broccoli, kale, and mustard greens
• Up until 4 weeks before the first frost date: cilantro
• Up until 2 weeks before the first frost date: quick-growing leaf lettuce

6. In Fall

• Plant garlic cloves in empty spaces between other plants for a spring harvest.

7. Continual Harvest

• Begin harvesting greens as soon as baby greens are big enough to need thinning.
• Pull up entire plants to make room for others to grow.
• Continue harvesting greens and other vegetables as they become ready and fill in with transplants or seeds as space becomes available.
• Watch for quick changes. Check your polyculture garden every day to harvest and water as needed.
• Harvest parsnips in late fall to winter.

Conclusion

A polyculture vegetable garden is a densely planted, diverse, integrated, mini-ecosystem, full of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers to harvest throughout the growing season. It’s so much more than the related gardening strategies of interplanting and companion planting.

But polyculture gardening isn’t for everyone. I provided a list of the benefits and drawbacks of polycultures to help you decide if a polyculture garden is suitable for you.

If it is, then I hope that Ianto Evan’s simple polyculture example from Hemenway’s book got the juices flowing for your own polyculture design. And I hope that my steps to plan a polyculture garden will help you create your own. Maybe the example of my polyculture design for this year gave you some ideas as well.

I hope this discussion of polyculture garden design has inspired you to experiment with your own polycultures. If it has, then get out a pencil and piece of paper, or your favorite spreadsheet (or download and print my seed starting tracker), and get planning.

Happy growing.