I've got my garden on a drip attached to an automatic timer. I will never grow a plant without it being on an automatic watering system. It allows me to go on vacation, or just step away from the garden for days on end, which I do frequently.

1) weed control: More mulch, but use Sluggo. In particular, more wood chips, to get 2 or 3 years of respite.
2) weed control: sacrifice some of the growing season, let weeds germinate in beds that are too weedy, then hoe them out, then plant or seed. Always hoe a bed when harvest is finished.
3) drip irrigation. Nowadays, twist-on drip pipes take a few hours to set up for 2500 sq.ft.
4) bigger, maintenance free plants. More butternut, more tromboncino, fewer zucchini. More collards, fewer kale. More rutabaga, fewer carrots.
5) similar to 4), more green manures/cover crops: fava greens, bush peas
6) single harvest crops: winter squash, cabbage, turnip, onion, garlic, carrots, etc. Plus build your self a root cellar.
7) I have 2200 sq.ft. and I always cut whole plants instead of picking outer leaves. It saves time with radicchio, lettuce, chard, collards.

To me drip has to be manually controlled. It is used very intermittently to limit plant stress. It can be used only for large plant seedlings, but not for, say, carrot seedlings. Sometimes one goes two months without.

Oh yeah, I forgot about plant selection. I won't grow cherry or small salad tomatoes. Too much tomato drop (i.e. next year's volunteers), too much picking time, and too much hassle. I've learned to just take a big one and cut it up in the kitchen. LOL

And glib, I should add that I do adjust my watering depending on the weather, etc. Carrot seedlings got hand watering until they were established, stuff like that. But it's beautiful to be able to control it from the timer and walk away. Make me stand there with a hose and my garden will be dead by August, LOL

Interplanting is helping us garden more efficiently, though my list of good combos is short (so far). In spring, lettuce and arugula go between the onions as short-term smother crops. Pole beans go in skips in the corn row when the corn is a foot tall. Winter squash goes next to the corn so it can run as a weed-suppressing ground cover.

See the garden work table in the link below. Anything similar -- an old table on saw horses -- will save lots of steps and time. You should also get a Japanese nejiri weed scraper, an amazing tool!

Here is a link that might be useful: garden work station

rob,
I don't know if you are looking to save time or to produce more (or both).

I have recently "grown" my garden space to 4 x4'x10' raised beds and I want to get the most out of them that I can.

I use 2 beds strictly for season long plants - tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, etc.
The 2 other bed I am using for succession planting - radishes, peas, beans, carrots, beets, lettuce, broccoli, onions, kohlrabi, garlic, etc. I plan on succession planting as soon as 1 plant type is done, planting with another.

Several things that have helped with this:
- Winter sowing. This is a great way to get plants going and ready to plant in the spring. There is a winter sowing forum on Gardenweb.
- Seed tape. In the dead of winter I made seed tape as I had time and helped to get ready for spring planting with out the need to thin seedlings.

Happy gardening.

I've gone to lots of vertical trellis. It saves on space and back pain!

Thanks, all good comments. I do automate watering, try to plant intensive/successive enough to keep the weeds suppressed, grow vertically, and do some "mock root cellaring", all big time savers. I agree 100%.

One thing mentioned that I'm not doing is winter sowing. I spend a lot of time/effort getting starts ready in winter/spring to maximize my season, but perhaps I'll experiment with winter sowing to minimize that.

I should also take up the cover crop suggestion as well. I'll have to experiment with how it fits in with my usual winter veggies, but I've heard of several benefits it can bring (soil fertility/structure and weed suppression).

I also like the garden work table suggestion. That's been on the todo list for awhile now. Now that my location/layout is getting settled I'll probably also build a small shed so I don't have to keep dragging tools across the property.

With those improvements (and what I'm already doing) the remaining main time sink is probably still keeping up on the weeds. Hopefully this will get better as I maintain the growing space, but I know it'll never go away. I'm still leery on mulch though...even with Sluggo. I'm my experience this creates more problems than good. Has anybody else in a similarly wet, slug-infested area had luck with this approach?

As far as maximizing production vs. minimizing effort...I guess my goal is a combination of both. When I had a smaller plot I was all about maximizing production regardless of effort (lots of dense succession planting with ready-to-go starts, and frequent weeding to minimize competition). Now that I have a larger area to play with I was thinking I might be able to get away with not working each sqft as intensively. If I open things up too much though, then I'll have more weeds. So it feels like I'm now just stuck intensively gardening 10x more space...which is why I came asking for "industrial"-style tips. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine that home gardeners with 3-5K sqft are doing things the same way that those with smaller plots are.

If anybody has any other "no, you're doing it all wrong" or "the way to scale up is to change your mindset to..." suggestions I'd love to hear them. I'm always up for expanding my bag of tricks.

Thanks again for the help.

-Rob

Last tip: you can save 1000 sq ft of cardboard in one year if you try. When beds become too overrun with weeds, cardboard is one other trick that can be applied at your scale. But I still prefer wood chips and large plants for efficiency.

I have covered the non planted / walk areas with old carpet and / or cardboard. Clean area to walk and no grass/weeds. Divert your bath/shower water to garden and use as stored water, save money and time.

I use cardboard a lot.

For efficiency, I don't think anything beats the old straight rows and the hoe, dirt mulch. Of course, it also tires ground out quickly, so fallowing is critical. The fallow is when weeds often take over, so the smart farmer plants the cover crops in rows as well and hoes, just like for the food crop.

Too bad I'm not that smart, or that energetic.