Hot and Sweet 4 x 4-foot Pickling Garden

Using this plan, gardeners of any skill level can produce their own ingredients for fresh, homemade pickles and pickled veggies.

Plant the ingredients for pickles in a garden.

Pickled sweet peppers, pickled hot peppers, pickled cucumbers—this garden is designed especially for you pickle lovers! Dill and onions round out your favorite pickling recipes. Plant this garden in late spring after your last frost date as cucumbers and peppers need warm weather to grow.

For excellent results, fill your bed with premium quality raised bed soil, such as Miracle-Gro® Performance Organics® Raised Bed Mix—which is just the right weight and texture for raised bed growing—and feed plants with Miracle-Gro® Performance Organics® Raised Bed Plant Nutrition Granules to ensure they get all the nutrition they need. Fill your Hot and Sweet Pickling Garden with Bonnie Plants®, the company that has been helping home gardeners grow successfully for over a century.

If you want to expand your garden, place two 4 x 4 beds symmetrical on either side of a 3 to 4-foot path, wide enough for you and your tools. Try the Sweet & Spicy Pepper Garden or another Pickling Garden for the second bed.

Planting the 4 x 4 – foot Bed

Take inspiration from these planting options. The plan allows for some interpretation depending on your taste. These plants are pictured small to make the illustration simpler, but your bed will be spilling over as the plants grow! Following spacing on the plant labels, add a few more plants than we have pictured if the spacing allows.

Pickling garden.
Pickling garden.

Area 1: Onions and Dill

You can overplant the onions and harvest half (every other one) as small green onions, allowing the remaining onions to grow to full size.

  • 12-24 Georgia Sweet onions
  • 2 Fernleaf dill

Area 2: Peppers

  • 1 Hot or Sweet Red Cherry pepper
  • 1 Jalapeño pepper

Area 3: Trellised Cucumbers

Support and train cucumbers on a tall wire trellis.

  • 2 Boston Pickling cucumbers
Pickling garden key.
Pickling garden key.