This is post is a combination of all of Karen’s Square Foot Gardening posts!
Square Foot Gardening: Intro
March 23,2015
A Square Foot Garden could be the ideal method if you’re OCD. It’s also great for those — like me — who enjoy the detail and general persnickityness of a well-planned, orderly space.
This method is ideal if you’re new to gardening or have very little space. You could conceivably grow a cute little square foot garden on your apartment balcony as long as it gets at least six hours of direct sunlight a day.
Square Foot Gardening was developed by Mel Bartholomew several decades ago. Thousands, or who knows, millions of gardeners have adopted the methods he laid out in his books, “Square Foot Gardening” (1981) and “All New Square Foot Gardening” (2006).
Mel guides you to build wooden boxes with 2x4s, which are not really 2 x 4 inches. You fill your boxes with a special soil mixture, which is not really soil.
Square foot gardening grids out vegetables (or flowers or herbs) into square feet. You make each wooden box (square foot garden) 4 feet by 4 feet, then make grids that delineate each square foot. If you’re really good at math, you’ll realize that each box will have 16 squares for planting. And if you take square foot gardening on faith, and do it correctly according to the book, you will grow a crazy number of plants in very little space.
“All New Square Foot Gardening” lays it all out, and I have scoured the book many times. There seem to be so many advantages that I thought, “Why not?”
Gardening by the square foot is based on pure logic (and I do so love logic):
- It uses less water.
- Weed control is practically effortless.
- It looks cute.
- It takes up much less space than conventional long-row gardening.
- It works for vegetables, herbs and flowers.
- It uses a nutritious “soil” mixture that you never have to change or fertilize — just add to it.
- The raised beds are as permanent as you want them to be.
- It uses natural crop rotation and companion planting.
- Tilling is no longer on the to-do list.
Square Foot Gardening: A book and a plan
March 28,2015
Son-in-law Nathan made a schematic of my garden area in order for me to move ahead with my Square Foot Garden. I planned and planted according to a grid that I put on paper before building the boxes.
Square Foot Gardening: Building the Boxes
March 30,2015
Musclemen Ed and Nathan made my boxes out of 1x6x16 cedar boards that I had considerately had cut into four-foot lengths at the lumber store. They used two landscape screws for each corner.
Square Foot Gardening: Filling the Boxes
March 31,2015
Son Ed and I mixed the soil for two boxes at a time. We loaded equal parts vermiculite, baled peat moss and compost onto a large tarp, picked up the corners and slid the ingredients until they were combined. This stuff is really heavy.
The day after my helpers went home, I filled the boxes and nailed 4-foot stakes across the boxes to form the planting grid. (Cue the Wonder Woman music.)
Square Foot Gardening: Growth!
April 4, 2015
Success!
Most everything was up two to three weeks after planting. Now it was a matter of lightly watering close to the soil. One beauty of Square Foot Gardening is that you’re only watering the plants themselves, not the weed seeds in the outlying dirt. Weeds within the squares are easy to pull out of the nice, loose soil when they’re little. This seems pretty efficient to me.
