Posted by Sue Landsman on Jun.29, 2009

©iStockphoto.com - Maica

If there’s anything more humbling than having kids, it’s having a garden. Sometimes things don’t grow, sometimes they grow too much and force you to spend all your time weeding and fighting Mother Nature. I’ve spent three years trying to grow a garden of three long beds at the back of my yard in a little section of our field that I’d tilled and planted. Each year it was an unending source of toil, stress, and mostly failure. It was such a dismal failure that I could even see how overgrown it was from satellite using Google Earth.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered a new way of gardening that’s been a complete pleasure and such a success that I haven’t even pulled one single weed in four weeks. Now that I’ve learned about Square Foot Gardening, I understand what I did wrong in the past and have a method to my madness–without the madness.

In 2006, Mel Bartholomew published the “All New” version of his book “Square Foot Gardening” and promised that absolutely anyone, including children and the handicapped, could enjoy gardening. In a space just twenty percent of a traditional single-row garden, he claims, you can have a larger yield than ever before. His secret? Raised beds filled with a special soil mix, and laying out a grid so that you can plant for maximum yield.

Most people when they plant a garden, as I did, set up the garden at the edge of the yard away from the house. This is a bad idea, Bartholomew argues, because you’re less likely to visit your garden and before you know it, you’ll be overwhelmed by weeds. People plant gardens far away because they think they need to till a large area, but this is a false assumption. The Square Foot Gardening method uses 4 by 4 foot square boxes six inches deep that can be placed on a patio or near the house. Because you’re filling them with the special “Mel’s Mix” instead of digging, you don’t have to worry about damaging your landscaping or working with bad soil. I planted my square-foot garden on my septic field this year. It was perfectly flat, and nothing grows there — except all my vegetables, now!

Instead of depending on the less-than ideal soil in your yard, you’re basically planting your beds with potting soil. Bartholomew recommends using a mixture that is 1/3 compost (he’s picky — it has to come from at least 5 sources), 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 peat moss. To make the mix you dump out the bags of compost, vermiculite and peat moss onto a large tarp and then rake it around until it’s relatively uniform. If you’re only planting one bed, you should be able to drag the tarp full of soil over to where you need it and just shovel it in.

Because the beds are small, you can reach every part of the bed from outside its border. This is important, because it means you don’t need to step on and compact the soil. Because the soil remains loose, there is more space available for roots and thus more plants can grow than would in a similar space of compacted soil. The loose soil also makes it very easy to remove weeds, if you actually have any. The small size of the bed makes it easy to use as a tabletop garden for people who have trouble bending over or who are confined to a wheelchair. They can even be made with a plywood bottom so that you can take your garden with you if you move or go on a long vacation over the summer.

Once you’ve got the soil in, you can use either string or wooden lath to mark out sixteen boxes in each bed. You can also use electrical conduit pipe and tomato netting to create a frame at the rear of your bed for plants that you wish to grow vertically like tomatoes or beans. You can even grow watermelon and zucchini vertically! The lath, aside from showing everyone that you’re a true square-foot-gardening geek, will mark off the 16 square feet of planting area so that you can figure out what you want to plant where. Bartholomew’s book describes the spacing most plants require: large plants like tomatoes can only be planted one per square, where smaller plants like beets can be planted 16 to a square. Others you can plant either at 9 per square or 4 per square.

And once you’ve planted your vegetables? Wait and watch — since you’ve planted your garden near your house, you’ll be able to look out your windows and see just how your garden grows.

For more information, check out Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening website.

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Posted under Home Environment, Organic Garden.