Friday, April 9, 2010

Square Foot Gardening

Last year I tried out square foot gardening for the first time and I am sold! I built boxes, which you can see examples of in my July 2009 blog posts. I will get organized here and link all garden, cooking and so on posts so they are easy to find. Anyway, I laid down ground cover, which I will be putting a layer of mulch or gravel on around the boxes this year. My friend Helene used pvc pipe to make hoops to put netting over to keep pests such as deer out of the beds, so I did the same thing and it worked great. If you look closely you can sort of see them to the right of the house.
Here is how some of the plants were doing in July last year. I direct seeded a lot of my stuff. You can see basil, baby pac choi, carrots and so on. I was so thrilled with how everything grew!

Peas, lettuce and beans are some of the crops I planted. The beans didn't do as well as I like but hey there's always this year! I may try something different.
 My broccoli and cauliflower went great guns! I really need to rethink which box I plant them in this year. I did them about 12 apart and that was a bit crowded, but hey they did well so maybe crowding was okay.
I would encourage anyone planning on gardening this year for the first time to look into Mel Bartholemew's square foot gardening. The link is to the right.

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