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?

Filed under: Reference