Antipodean Bucket Farmer wrote:
Hi, Everybody,

My vegetable garden is small, so I want to maximise the
nutrition per square metre of space.

I have about eighty buckets (10-litre/2.5 gal each.)
This area lets me do a "summer mode" with tomatoes,
capsicums, etc, and then a "winter mode" with leafy
greens like spinach, lettuce, etc.

For these two situations, what are good choices for
nutritional efficiency?

There are plenty of books on strategies to get
the most out of your garden.

One approach is to judge growth rates. Pick
fast growing like radish and slow growing like
corn and plant them close together. The radish
is harvested before the corn has grown tall enough
to shade the radishes out of growth. My folks
did that in gardens before I left for college.

In decorative gardening shade is used as a tool
so why not in food gardening as well. Pick some
tall plants that like direct light, medium ones
that like partial shade, low ones that like mostly
shade. Plant them close together. I do some of
this with flowers so it should work with veggies.

How about long term vs short term? Plant a
perennial in each bucket. When they have little
folliage plant some annual in the same bucket.
Nut trees might give really good long term
nutrition per-bucket but I don't think that's the
same as the per-meter you asked about.