Square Foot Gardening

Spring is here, which means that pretty soon we will be able to plant, yeeaaahh! Last summer I tried out Square Foot Gardening and I loved it. This is a picture of my garden from last summer. It is great because you can control your soil 100% which means it can be 100% organic, and if you have sandy or poor soil for growing it doesn't matter. Also it is great at preventing weeds naturally. Plus I always got complimented on it by the neighbors. I used the book Square Foot Gardening to get started, which I would recommend - I am just outlining the basic principles on this post. However they also have a great website you can use to save yourself some cash.

Building your box:

• The boxes are 4' x 4' - you can either make them yourselves (which we did) or you can use a recylced pallet from a grocery store that they would otherwise be throwing away.
• The bottom is covered with weed cloth (we just nailed it to our boards)
• Then you divide your 4' x 4' square into 16 one square foot sections.
• The sections are important because in the book they tell you exactly how many vegetables/herbs can fit it one square foot. For example you can put one tomato plant per one square foot section.

Making your own soil - you need enough to fill the box to the rim so you need to buy quite a bit of the following ingredients. ( I use organic compost/soil etc - but it is not necessary). Then mix them all evenly together before placing in the square foot garden.

• 1/3 compost
• 1/3 peat moss
• 1/3 top soil -- make sure it includes vermiculite (the book recommends 1/3 coarse vermiculite but i used top soil with vermiculite because it was easier to find)

Planting - yeaah!!! This was one of my favorite parts. Here are a couple of guidelines:

• Tomato - one per square
• Peppers (hot and sweet) - one per square
• Carrots - 8 - 10 per square
• Cilantro - one per square
• Basil - one per square
• Chives 2 - 3 per square

Watering guidelines

• Cold water can shock plants, it is good to water them with water close to the air temperature. If you notice in the picutre I have a large bin that i keep filled with water (on a side note it also is great for collecting rain water) that I use to water the plants.
• When watering don't spray with a hose, dip a cup into your water bucket and water the plant right at its base to ensure the plant gets all the water.
• Don't water in the hottest part of the day - if you get drops of water on the plant leaves the sun can burn a whole in them.
• I watered almost daily, unless we got rain or the soil seemed very damp.

I hope you found this post useful, and enjoy square foot gardening as much as I did. Feel free to ask me questions and I can try and answer them.

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