This is my first year Gardening and I absolutely love it! Because we have a small yard and I wanted to try and grow a lot in a small space I went with the Square Foot Method. The first thing I did was read “All New Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew. This book is fantastic! It gives very easy instructions for building the boxes, mixing the soil, building cages to keep the critters out, and what to plant when.
My Hubby helped me (read: he did a lot of the work…) to build four boxes. Each box is 4'x4'. Three of the boxes are 6 inches deep while the other box is 12 inches deep. We also built cages that sit on top of the box until the plants are bigger to keep our evil squirrels out.
Our squirrels are possessed by the way. They do things just to mess with me, like dig up my plants and lay them next to the bed, hide things in my pots, and then they sit on my deck looking in the windows to see my frustration.
Our squirrels are possessed by the way. They do things just to mess with me, like dig up my plants and lay them next to the bed, hide things in my pots, and then they sit on my deck looking in the windows to see my frustration.
I started by planting cabbage, broccoli, peas, and onions. Then I put in carrots and brussels sprouts. I have now started the peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, more cabbage and herbs.
Here are my beds in early April.
Here they are now!
Amazing! It is so exciting to see all of the plants growing and thriving. It is also crazy how much greener the grass is now. Because I am growing in raised beds, I don’t really have to weed so after everything is planted there is very little work. I am not using any chemicals and I am very careful to inspect the plants every day for bad bugs. I took a horticultural class in college and I remember the professor saying that a healthy plant will need fewer chemicals to keep it that way. I am trying to take off dead leaves and stems to keep my plants as healthy as I can!
Tomorrow I will post about what is in each bed and how many plants I put per square.
6 comments:
can you describe how you made the boxes? what kind of wood did you use? how did you know how much wood to buy? did the lumber yard make the cuts for you or did you have to make all the cuts yourself? Did you nail or staple the boxes together? How did you make the 12 inch deep one? stack two 6 inch or use another kind of wood? What did you use for the cages and the trellises? Are these enough questions...LOL...??
Those are great questions. In stead if answering them in a reply I will do a separate post explaining how we made the beds!
Hi, I am a friend of your cousin, Trent. We are trying the SFG, too, but are having a bear of a time getting all the ingredients. First, we couldn't find the vermiculite then learned on the forum to get the Mikaflakes insulation at Menard's. NOW we can't find the five different compost types. GRRRRR. Our boxes have been made for a few weeks, the grass is dead, but there is nothing inside them yet. How/where did you find your compost?
Hello! We found our compost at two different places. We got two kinds at Home Depot and then three at a local garden store. As long as each kind is made by a different manufacturer you are ok. So if you find two kinds that say they are mushroom but are made by two different people then that's ok and can count as two different kinds. It was hard for us to get all the stuff for the dirt also. We got the Vermiculite at a local garden store in BIG bags so that was great and then the peat moss was easy. I would look at some of the smaller garden stores and see if they have different brands of compost. Also remember some place like wal-mart, a farm and fleet type store or local feed mill might have a brand that they carry. It might be easier to call around then drive all over the place. The local place that we got the three different kinds from was more landscaping and big trees not flowers.
Another out of the box solution is to ask if anyone you know has horses or owns a farm that has some old poo you could have. Just make sure that it is old and dried out not fresh, fresh will be to hot and might burn your plant roots. The dirt was a chalange but my plants are growing so well it really is worth the work.
When you do get everything, mix the dirt in small batches on a big tarp the dirt gets heavy very fast and can be hard to mix. Let me know how the hunt goes!
Thanks for the info. We will be following up with different places in the next few days. Another question---re: the peat moss---did you find that you used all that you figured you would need or did you use less? Did you fluff it first and then use less than you thought? On the forum some people were posting that they had problems with their veggie plants dying because of too much peat moss. Others responded that when they fluffed it, it required less. Is this a confusing question?
We have two 4x8 boxes and one 4x4. We have 8 bags of peat (3c ft each) and 8 bags of vermiculite (3c ft each). That seems like a lot to me. And now to figure out how much compost we need, YIKES! How will all that fit in those few boxes? Oy.
Well when we set all of the dirt out to start mixing I thought we would have WAY to much but we had to go get more stuff last week for my potato's! We mixed one brick of Peat Moss, One bag of Vermiculite and then five bags of compost (one bag of each kind). We had to do that three times to fill all of the beds and my potato cans. We had a little left over for me to do potting but ended up need more. So you will need more then yo think. The peat seemed to be fine we used the 3c brick and have not have any problems. It is kind of fluffy though so we watered it a little while we mixed everything to stop it from blowing all over but don't water to much or it will be to heavy to mix!
The nice thing is once you have this part done it is done forever and you will use the dirt every year! I took some pictures of the stuff we used and how we mixed everything I am trying to find them... I think my computer ate them.. As soon as I find them I will post some so you can see what we did.
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