Why Square Foot Gardening?

So I have all sorts of ideas and hopes for this site, the least of which is to document my gardening efforts and keep all the information I research in one place. We’ll see if this turns into anything bigger than that!

 To begin, I thought I’d explain why, when I wanted to garden, I chose the square foot method.

  • Easy Setup: The gardening bug hit me hard, but my husband has yet to catch it.  I needed a garden I could plan, build, and maintain all by myself. I ordered my boxes from www.squarefootgardening.com,  hauled peat moss, vermiculite, and bags of compost in my Ford Taurus, and put it all together with the help of a 15-year old neighbor girl.
  • Space: Our lot is about 1/5 of an acre, and while I could have made room for a traditional garden it would have taken up most of my backyard.
  • Simplicity: While there are a ton of things you CAN do to grow a successful garden, there are only a few things that MUST be done. Mel Bartholemew’s book All New Square Foot Gardening gives simple instructions to build, plant, and harvest a garden. BTW, the cheapest place to buy the book is Amazon.com.

Now, the best reason to do SFG became clear about halfway through the growing season:

  • NO WEEDING. One of my boxes sits next to a weed-infested city park (separated only by chain link), and it grew maybe 10 weeds total. The other boxes had no weeds at all. I can easily say I spent less than 1% of my time pulling weeds. Following Mel’s method and using his “Mel’s Mix” instead of soil removed the most time-consuming and annoying aspect of gardening–weeds.

Have you done square foot, container, or intensive gardening? What benefits have you experienced?

One Response to “Why Square Foot Gardening?”

  1. Hi Emily! Fun site. I will have to bookmark it and follow along with you this summer.

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