Posted on August 10, 2007 in latest news
A retired American engineer called Mel Bartholomew came up with the idea of Square Gardening. He believed that the conventional home gardening is too time consuming and requires a bit too much effort.
With Square Foot Gardening, you can grow the same quality of vegetables at home with comparatively lesser effort, space and time.
Basics of Square Foot Gardening
- Pick an area that gets about 6-8 hours of sunlight everyday.
- Divide your garden into beds that are easily accessible from all sides.
- These beds should further be divided into units.
- Each unit is about 4’x4’.
- Build boxes to hold the soil above the ground.
- Each square unit should be about 3’ apart from the other so that there can be walking aisles around each square.
- Soil should consist of 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost and 1/3 coarse vermiculite.
- Select a different herb crop, a vegetable and a different flower in each square foot. You can plant about 9-12 plants per square foot.
- Plant about 2-3 conserved seeds per hole.
- For transplants, make a small saucer shaped depression.
- Do not water by your hose-pipe, you might end up over-watering. Water your plants adequately by hand from a bucket of sun-warmed water.
- Harvest your plants when they grow up.
- After harvesting your square foot add compost and replant it with a new different crop.
Caution
- Do not walk on your square foots.
- Always tend to your plants from the aisles that surround your square foot on either sides.
- Make sure your square foot garden gets ample sunlight.
Benefits of Square Foot Gardening
- Though Square Foot Gardening is a new method, the simplicity of its concept makes it easier to understand and apply.
- Square Foot Gardening is very user friendly and doesn’t require any specialists. Its great for beginners.
- You can locate square foot gardens anywhere close to your house as long as you have ample sunlight.
- Square Foot Gardening is also very economical and reduces all the costs down to five times.
- Even though Square Foot Gardening uses half the space used in conventional gardening, yet it is equally efficient.
- Square Foot Gardens are easy to protect because of their small size and proximity.
- Square Foot Gardens are very environment friendly because the allow recycling and reuse of resources.
- Square Foot Gardens have five-fold harvest, which means they are highly productive.
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August 11th, 2007 at 10:34 am
I know Mel’s book for some years and I appreciate his ideas very much. More and more people should be convinced to set up some experiments in their garden, particularly if space is limited. Allow me a couple of remarks : (1) Don’t overrate the advantages ! People are not tempted to believe everything that seems exaggerated, e.g. a 5-fold harvest for every vegetable ; (2) Recommended dimensions and numbers should only be a general indication and people should be invited to adapt these general rules to their local situation and chosen plant species ; (3) In desertlike environment I recommend to put a series of containers (plastic bottles or bags) within the square foot boxes. When growing vegetables in these containers, less water is needed (see my weblog). Anyway, square foot gardening is a win-win system.
August 11th, 2007 at 10:40 am
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