Square Foot Gardening: Planting More Bang for Your Buck By Duffy Perkins Do you want to plant a high-yield vegetable garden but need more acres to sustain yourself? ? You might consider square foot gardening, a popular technique that yields a more significant crop by utilizing organizational skills.
but it can still get into your food.” Larkin recommends untreated lumber (which will eventually decay) or plastic. For the grid, wooden dowels, string, even old wooden blinds can work to create your spacers. Planning Your Garden…And Involving the Kids In the book that started it all, All New Square Foot Gardening , Mel Bartholomew recommends the following spacing for plants: Extra-large plant: 1 plant per square foot
What is Square Foot Gardening? Square Foot Gardening was created by Mel Bartholomew in 1976 as a simple alternative to what he viewed as inefficient row gardening. In 1996, Mel founded the Square Foot Gardening Foundation to pursue his mission of solving world hunger by teaching people how to grow their own food with limited resources. In a nutshell, square foot gardening takes a 4-foot by 4-foot space (ideally a raised bed) and overlays a grid (1-foot by 1-foot, hence the name) on top, creating individual blocks for your plants. Depending on the size and needs of the plant, you can place one or several plants in each block to maximize your garden space. Plants depend on the nutrients in the soil, and some can be greedy. Using a soil blend rich with peat moss (or coconut coir), vermiculite, and organic compost will help satisfy plants within their blocks, and lead to less sneaking. Some Tips From the Pros Andrea Larkin, manager at Bru-Mar Gardens in Annapolis, has more tips: “With square foot gardening, you can do a little companion planting so that plants will benefit from each other. Tomatoes and basil tend to grow well together because they put things into the soil that the other needs.” By creating happy neighbors, your plants will flourish in close proximity. Larkin stresses the importance of using untreated lumber to protect plants, too. “Treated lumber has chemicals that can leach into the soil,” she says. “It may be a normal amount,
Large plant: 4 plants per square foot Medium plant: 9 plants per square foot Small plant: 16 plants per square foot
For example, a single cabbage would fit in a square, four heads of Swiss chard could be in the next block, and 16 radishes in the next block over. This is a great, manageable gardening option to involve kids with. They can help mix the soil, measure out the grid lines, and help with the math of seeds or plants per square. Give kids a say in which plants are planted, let them press the little holes in the dirt, and drop the seeds…and then watch, come harvest-time, when they are actually excited to try those veggies! Square foot gardening makes it easy to consolidate your gardening within an attractive, organized space. Great for kids just learning about gardening as well as old green thumbs, this is a fun way to enjoy growing your own food without needing an excessive amount of space.
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