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.
Disclaimer: I used Square Foot Gardening for several years. Then I bought a chest freezer (no wait, I mean a freezer that is a chest). Now I have much more room for my harvest, so I have gone back to the crazy yields of row gardening.
Next: Square Foot Gardening: a book and a plan
