Square Foot Gardening, Organically

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
March 4th, 2009
Filed in Fruits, Veggies and Herbs
Tags: garden, vegetables

I have been reading the book, All New Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew, for another project I am working on.  If you’ve been reading this winter, you know that I am [ ] that close to starting my own vegetable garden at my first house.  I have grown lots of vegetables before, just not at my house and not using this method.  I had been using the method that pretty much everyone else I know uses, which is to plant in rows.  Where I was, that was appropriate.  I was gardening 50 sq. ft. by 50 sq. ft. plots-three of them, with a couple of other people to help.  We produced, literally, tons of vegetables.  For just my husband and me, I don’t need nearly as many veggies, but had not really decided what to do.

Should I Sub Veggetables for Flowers?

Before I started reading the Square Foot Gardening book, I had more or less decided to plant mostly vegetables in my flower beds where I usually plant my annuals.  Last year, I had a nice, six inch layer of compost/topsoil blend dumped in my front yard-enough to fill a bed filling an entire 1/3 of my front yard, which is pretty big.  I planted my mini-butterfly garden directly across from that bed, right underneath the window where my dog lounges so she could watch the butterflies.  (Yes, my parents have a magnet that says “My Grandchild is a Dog.”  They don’t have it on their car.  I think they are holding out for the real thing.)

In Nort Carolina where I live, it is hard to get a nice, even lawn full of grass if you don’t install sod and an irrigation system, of which, I have neither.  I was lucky, though, if you can call it that, to have pretty decent grass in my yard.  I hope I live in this house for a long time, but if I don’t, I am hesitant to rip up my entire lawn, which is what I would like to do, to plant vegetables and flowers.  If  I were to try to sell the house to anyone other than a plant fanatic, I might run into issues.  I tweeted about this topic a few days ago, and got a nifty response from someone saying, just plant flowers and veggies in your flowerbed.  That would lure bees and other pollinators to your vegetables.  She is right, there!  If I decide to plow up part of my non-flower bed yard, though, I will probably try the Square Foot Gardening method this year.

Why the Grid System?

I am a firm believer that you need to try something before you can really understand all of it.  (Hence, why I have been scouting my neighborhood for scrap crap to build a compost bin.)  I think I might just try this gardening system for the following reasons:

• It is scalable.  You plant blocks that are four feet by four feet, divided into one foot by one foot squares.  You can add as many four foot blocks as you want, as long as you have space to put a path in between the blocks and you have plenty of light.
• The one by one scale makes it hard to plant too many of any one thing.  I have had the unfortunate experience of having 60 heads of lettuce ready at the SAME TIME.  The local food pantry was very happy with that one.
• Harvesting and re-planting a one by one foot block is much less time consuming than harvesting and planting rows upon rows at the same time.
• The close spacing makes for easy watering, and for de-facto companion planting.  (I’ll talk about that more tomorrow.)
• But one thing about companion planting is that it makes gardening using organic methods much easier.
• Gardening with such small scale spaces with pathways in-between will make it much easier to avoid stepping on the soil, hence avoiding compacting the soil.

Those seem like enough good reasons to me!  Have any of you tried this? Do you like it? Do you have any pointers?  I would love to know!