Square Foot Gardening 2011 Edition- Update 1

Last years square foot garden was a huge success! Kim and I learned a lot and we plan on taking the lessons learned and carrying them over to this seasons garden. What amazed us was how little work it took to maintain this type of garden and how much fun we had harvesting all our crops!

By far the two most helpful resources were the Mel Bartholomew's "All New Square Foot Gardening" book and the Square Foot Gardening Foundation website.

The book is a must have in my opinion. It outline's the soil mix and gives you planting layouts for your garden. I built 4'X6' beds instead of the recommended 4'X4' beds simply because I had the space for them. You choose what's right for you. Whatever you do however, don't cut corners on your soil mix ingredients!

Getting Ready for 2011

Winter was pretty harsh here as well as the rest of the country so the garden went dormant. The soil had settled a couple of inches in spots below the top of the frames so.......

Here's what I added to top them off:


1 bag of Black Kow brand cow manure



1 bag Black Hen brand chicken manure (rocket fuel!!)



1 bag mushroom compost


Sphagnum peat moss- some leftover I had laying around


Agricultural vermiculite- about 2.5 gallons

I poured all the bags into the beds and mixed them together by hand. It worked better doing it this way since the soil is so loose and rich.


Here's what it looked like when I got done. Mmmmm, pretty!



Rabbit Protection

The biggest threat to our garden last year was rabbits! They're everywhere and they like to eat stuff in gardens! So, in order to protect the crop, a barrier is mandatory. I researched putting up 1/2" galvanized hardware cloth but it was just way too expensive. I decided on using plastic hardware cloth instead. It's durable and only costs about $8.00 for a 25 foot roll. Plus it comes in a 36 inch width so I just cut it in half giving me 18" tall sections- plenty high enough to keep the rabbits out.




Here's the finished fence. Those are plastic garden stakes weaved through the cloth on all four corners. Bamboo stakes on the mid sections give extra stability and eliminates the fence flopping around. It works great!



Buying Seeds



Our favorite place to buy seeds and get local growing advice is from Renfro's Hardware Store. Having a local resource like this is invaluable.

So far we've picked up some Renfro Lettuce Mix, Renfro Spiniach Mix, Butercrunch Lettuce, Scarlet Globe Radish, Early Scarlet White Tipped Radish, and Derby Bush Beans.

We also plan on adding a couple varieties of tomato plants, burp-less cucumbers, and pepper plants.

I'm not sure why but last year our pepper plants did not take. I was really bummed about that. My plan is to get a couple more varieties of peppers and plant them in the other bed. Sunlight issues maybe?

Stay tuned for more updates.

Cheers!