Parterre Vegetable Garden Layout - Raised Beds

While stuck indoors over the last several days because of the cold weather I thought perhaps designing a couple vegetable garden layouts might be a fun use of my time. This particular vegetable garden design fits into the classic parterre layout. A vegetable garden with the parterre garden design would easily lend itself to a good crop rotation plan with its four main sections. The middle circular bed could be used as a decorative planter with flowers and a fountain or as an herb garden.

This garden layout is relatively small and could fit in most backyards. The center paths are about 4 feet wide to easily accommodate wheel barrows or those with wheelchairs. The outside pathway is only 2 feet wide in the layout but could be expanded to four. If I were building this layout for my vegetable garden I would use reclaimed brick or decorative stone for the borders of the raised beds.

The different sections are labeled for easy crop rotation tracking based on the vegetable families.

Here's how the vegetable crop rotation* could start:

A) Legumes and Pods
B) Alliums (Onion family)
C) Solanaceous, Roots and Tubers
D) Brassicas (Cabbage family)

Crop rotation helps to reduce soil diseases and fungi by giving them time to die out before replanting a similar crop in the bed. Each year a new crop group goes into the next bed.  The vegetable family that starts in A in year 1 will move to B in year two. In four years the first group of vegetables will end up back in bed A.

Do you try to rotate your vegetables?


*This rotation is based upon the one found in the
American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening (Amazon)