We first became interested in square foot gardening after borrowing the
All New Square Foot Gardening from my mom, who I think learned of it from my Aunt Christine (they are both great gardeners). Square Foot Gardening permits you to grow a lot of different produce in a small space and involves limited maintenance. We are lucky that one of our local garden shops,
Rail City Garden Center, carries the special SFG soil mixture, Mel's Mix. When we redid our backyard last Spring we saved some space especially for this purpose. I highly recommend this method, especially for novice gardeners like us. We had never really grown vegetables before other than a meek and brief attempt to use a topsy turvy. Also, Lucy loved it and she gets excited when it is time to go outside to care for our plants!
Crops we tried this summer included zucchini, yellow summer squash, red onions, shallots, green onions, carrots, potatoes (we got only one potato!), bell peppers (also not a good yield), artichoke, eggplant, (planted too late but it was pretty), cucumber (total failure), green beans (literally two beans, total, which I ate straight from the garden) and herbs (all went to seed while we were out of town in June). The most successful crops were onions, carrots, zucchini and artichoke (despite transplanting the artichoke to its separate container once it got too big for the SFG). We also had loads of tomatoes but we grew those in separate pots with Mel's Mix. All in all it was a very fun experiment and one we are continuing with our winter garden (emphasis on experiment with the winter portion). Even if winter lasts a long time again in 2012 we now have our mini-greenhouse that we built (see below) so that will enable us to get an earlier start.
These photos tell the story of the garden from inception through our current winter garden (lettuces, rainbow chard, lacinato kale). We also planted garlic and short day onions to harvest in Spring 2012, but they may have gone in too late so we will see how that turns out. Stay tuned for what crops we try for 2012!
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| Helper-in-chief, Lucy. |
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| Lucy and David building the garden box, May 2011 |
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| Mel's Mix. In the SFG method you do not use any of your own soil, you use Mel's Mix, which is a mix of vermiculite, compost and peat moss (1/3 each). |
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| Pre-planting |
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Lucy points out some of our new plants. She often tried to eat ate things strait from the garden. Note how little the onions are here (on the left) and how you can barely even see the zucchini plant in the back right corner (in this photo it is hiding behind what turned out to be a very lazy pepper plant). Then note below how big everything got later in the summer. |
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| We grew some very decent sized zucchini. I think that is a dime in the photo. |
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| Mid summer! |
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| Our garden yielded one lone bell pepper. On the left you can see the artichoke plant before I transplanted it to its own container. |
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| Some rogue carrot seeds escaped the garden and flourished in the decomposed granite beside the box |
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| A torpedo onion peeking above the soil |
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| Lucy with one of the artichokes we grew. They were yummy but more herby tasting than grocery store variety. |
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| Fresh harvest. |
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| That is one single zucchini plant in the far right corner. It was basically a zucchini tree. And look at those tall onions! |
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| Onions (and their cousins) are a great crop because they are easy to grown and good keepers. We dried a lot of onions and shallots and they're stored in our cool garage. |
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| Newly planted winter garden, November 2011. |
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| Kale! The kale is the happiest of our winter crops so far. As it gets colder the leaves become more colored. |
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| The frame of our homemade greenhouse before we added the plastic sheeting. |
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| Baby rainbow (bright lights) chard. Even the roots are brightly colored! Those with pink stems have hot pink roots and the the yellow variety have bright yellow roots. |
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| Lettuces. I have now moved these inside to the window in the kitchen (see below). Outside became too cold. |
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| Fancy greenhouse. |
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| Chard is surviving but perhaps not thriving. Dec 20, 2011. |
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| Kale is doing well. I know these plants look small but I'm just impressed they are all still alive. Dec. 20, 2011. |
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| Lettuces recuperating indoors. (Christmas cactus at the right about to bloom!) |
