Square Foot Gazette

Sometime last summer, my wife stumbled across a seemingly little known way of gardening that is incredibly inexpensive and simple, while being highly effective. That way of gardening is called Square Foot Gardening, and was invented over 25 years ago by Mel Bartholomew. Throughout the last few months, my wife and I have been preparing for this year's growing season, building our gardens and getting ready to plant. (I say "we", but really 90% of the work has been done by my wife. I'm kinda just along for the ride ;-)

This blog is going to be my journal of our endeavors, challenges, and successes along the way.

About Square Foot Gardening
The basic premise of Square Foot Gardening (or SFG, as it's typically called) is that gardens can be grown cheaply and effectively in very little space. By reducing the amount of space that's used in traditional gardens, one eliminates the lion's share of the work and cost.

Traditional gardening has typically been done with the time-honored tradition of long rows over large spaces and is incredibly inefficient. It basically is an effort to apply large-scale farming principles to the much smaller requirements of individual families. This method, however, is inefficient and costly. Classical gardening / farming doesn't scale down, it only works when dealing in economies of a large scale.

Square Foot Gardening's name is a succinct description of what it is. In an SFG, one puts an entire garden in a rather limited space - say a four foot by four foot square. We plant any given crop we want to grow in a single square foot within this space. That gives us up to sixteen different crops we can plant in just a single 4' x 4' space. In any given square, we can have between one to sixteen plants, depending upon the size of the plant (for example, we'd only plant one head of cabbage but could plant sixteen rows of carrots).

With SFG, planting beds are made by raising the garden up and placing it on top of the native soil in the area. To make the raised garden, just get four lengths of lumber, preferably 6x2, cut to 4 feet long. Join them together with nails or screws (we used screws in our frames). Place the frame on the ground, and fill it to the top with Mel's Mix, which consists of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite. Do not use the soil on your property. The nutrient rich Mel's Mix will make the garden even more efficient and effective.

After filling the square, place a grid atop of it that clearly defines the borders of each square foot within the four-by-four space. Then, plant your crops accordingly by simply drawing a grid within each square and planting as many seeds as is appropriate (see Mel's book for details).

The other thing worth mentioning about SFG is how easy weeding becomes. Since all of the plants are placed so close together, there's very little room for weeds to take hold. Even for those few that do take root, they're easy to eliminate. Simply surveying the garden a few times a week allows you to spot the new weeds. Pulling them out is then only a matter of pinching them with your fingers and a light little yank. If you spend as much as fifteen minutes a week weeding in SFG, that's considered a busy week.

Our garden
Last Autumn, my wife and I set about building our own SFGs. We're looking to grow as many of our own vegetables as we can, and buy as few as possible. We surveyed our property, decided how much crop we wanted to grow, and carved out an appropriate space in our lawn. We went down to Home Depot and bought the need lengths of lumber, assembled our boxes, and laid them down on the ground.

Due to the volume of crop we wanted to produce, we had to order quite a bit of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. Making the mixtures was a bit of hard work, simply because of the volume. From here on out, however, we've already accomplished 90% of the work for the lifetime of our gardens. Each time we harvest a square and go to replant, all we need to do is add one trowel-full of Mel's Mix. So now making the Mel's Mix is a lot easier and won't be any trouble at all.

We had attempted to plant some Autumn crops, and were moderately successful at it. To allow our crops to survive into the colder months, we simply bought four pieces of PVC piping and made a frame over which we placed a plastic tarp. This impromptu greenhouse served us quite well in through November, almost until Christmas before a hard frost killed everything.

Nevertheless, we did manage to get a few salads out of the deal, not to mention the satisfaction of seeing crops for our hard work. Now that spring is here, we've been working hard the last few weeks to get things planted and ready.

Our efforts have gone beyond just SFG, and are extending into projects like composting and growing fruits such as blueberries and strawberries.

But more on that another time.