Whether you're itching to fill your big kitchen pot with gumbo, jambalaya, or another classic Cajun entree, it'll never taste fresher and better than when the ingredients come from your very own garden. Plant in spring after your last frost date, then start dreaming about the flavorful dishes you'll soon be serving to friends and family.
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. In addition to starting with great soil, you'll want to feed plants with Miracle-Gro® Performance Organics® Raised Bed Plant Nutrition Granules to ensure they get all the nutrition they need. Fill your Cajun garden with young plants from 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-foot beds symmetrically on either side of a 3- to 4-foot path, which should be just wide enough for you and your tools. Try our Sweet and Spicy Pepper Garden or Fresh and Handy Herb Garden for the second bed.
Planting the 4 x 4 – foot Bed
Take inspiration from these planting options, but feel free to mix things up a bit based on your tastes. These plants are pictured small to make the illustration simpler, but your bed will be spilling over as the plants grow! Following the spacing guidelines found on the individual plant tags (you can add a few more plants than we have pictured if space allows), and know that you'll need cages for the pepper and tomato plants.
Area 1: Sweet Potatoes
- 2 sweet potato plants
Area 2: Hot Peppers
- 1 Tabasco pepper plant in cage
- 1 cayenne pepper plant (regular or golden) in cage
Area 3: Tomatoes and Okra
- 1 Creole (or other) tomato plant in cage
- 1 okra plant