Square Foot Gardening

Vegetable Growing Made Easy

I encourage every gardener to try square foot gardening for vegetable production. In my time, I’ve seen many vegetable gardens abandoned to my fellow gnomes and me. Why? The manageable proportions of this system make gardening fun and easy for anyone. You can grow enough food for your whole family, or just enough to make a salad every night.

The entire layout is scalable-more of an engineering feat than a garden plan. In fact, an engineer, Mel Bartholomew, developed this system. He is a pretty smart gardener, for a human. (I snuck a peek in the window of my homeowner one day. He was reading the book-having gotten fed up with trying to grow vegetables the conventional way.)

A Better Way With Vegetables

Mel’s premise is simple: why plant more seeds to grow more plants than you need, only to spend hours upon hours thinning and weeding, and still be left with much more produce than you could ever eat? A mouthful, indeed!

With his system, you only plant enough seeds to produce the number of plants you want to eat-no more, no less. If you plant something that is particularly difficult to grow from seed, he recommends planting two seeds in the same planting hole-at the most, and snipping off the weaker one after they sprout.

And, you plant everything closer together, so your garden space is more productive.

Does It Sound Too Good To Be True?

• Plan the garden in four foot by four-foot blocks, each divided into sixteen one foot by one foot squares.
• Within each square, plant 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 or 16 plants of one variety.  Thespacing depends upon the plant.  You can only plant one broccoli plant per square, but you can plant four swiss chard or 16 radish plants.

• As you harvest each square, re-plant.  Planting is easy, because you are only working with one foot at a time.

• The garden is entirely scalable with this system because you can plant as many four foot by four foot blocks as you wish, with pathways in between.  You’ll spend less time weeding, use less water and have an easier time re-planting because you will grow only what you need, in a manageable amount of space.
• Because you are constantly re-planting with different varieties of vegetables, and many different kinds of vegetables are planted closely together, you get the benefit of companion planting-combinations of plants that naturally keep insects and pests away.

It Still Starts With Soil

You can use either organic or synthetic fertilizer to feed your plants, but you will have the most success if you also add organic matter , like compost , to the soil.

Bartholomew gives instructions for making a superior soil mix to use in your garden. The small and manageable size of the garden makes it easy to mix enough of the soil to give your vegetables an edge. Here’s Mel’s recipe to fill one four foot by four foot block to a depth of 12 inches:

• 1 bale of peat moss: 6 cubic feet
• 1 bag of coarse vermiculite: 4 cubic feet
• 10 pails of sand: 3 cubic feet
• 10 pails of compost: 3 cubic feet
• Four cups of lime
• Four cups of organic fertilizers

1. The plot sizes are small and manageable;
2. No matter how big the garden, you only plant one square foot at a time;
3. You plant only the foot you need, without waste or excess work.

Thank you, Mel Bartholomew. Gnomes like your system because it provides enough vegetables for us, as well as the gardener! And, it scales down the garden to just our size.

Happy gardening,

Geefrank

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