Square Foot Gardening
Posted by Unknown in Gardening, Square Foot Gardening on Tuesday 14 May 2013
By Kathy Van Mullekom
Daily Press
No matter how you garden – on the cheap or with wallet wide open – it’s wise to garden the smart way.
In the edible garden, smart means finding ways to maximize your harvest and minimize your workload and planting space.
These new gardening books outline ways to do just that. Each provides helpful how-to details – not just pretty photos.
Grow up, not
out: Raised beds and containers get lots of attention, but vertical
gardening is one of the easiest and most practical ways to grow edibles.
Vertical
gardening means people living in condos, apartments and other places
with limited yard space can reap the benefits of fresh food, according
to Chris McLaughlin, author of “Vertical Vegetable Gardening.”
Besides the
traditional trellises and arbors, the book shows how to grow on common
household items you can recycle or reuse for free: broken baby gates
that can be folded side up and spread to create an A-frame, crib springs
turned on their ends, ladders with boards put across the rungs to holds
pots, shoe bags filled with soil, tin tub gardens you can hang and
five-gallon buckets that are suspended from trees or poles.
McLaughlin also
shows how to turn wire, twine and other materials into arbors, teepees,
fences and A-frames to support vining, twining, twisting plants. Even a
kiddie pool filled with soil becomes a small garden. There are lists of
materials and directions on how to make each, and profiles identify 30
veggies, fruits and herbs best suited for vertical gardening.
Make every foot
count: Square-foot gardening took root 30 years ago when Mel
Bartholomew wrote his first book on how to garden less to get more – for
example, 48 crops from two 4-by-6-foot boxes.
Two million
copies later, he now operates the Square Foot Gardening Foundation (
squarefootgardening.org) and recently released two new books on the
topic – the “Square Foot Gardening Answer Book” and the “All New Square
Foot Gardening, Second Edition.”
The answer book
draws on hundreds of questions he’s heard over the years, including how
to garden in a shady yard, how to calculate the potential yield from a
square-foot garden, how to deter pests and how to rotate crops for
maximum results.
He also
addresses common problems all gardeners can relate to: The gnats in my
square-foot garden are a real bother; how can I deal with them? Make a
spray by mixing 1 part vodka with three parts water. No, don’t drink it;
spray the area infested by the gnats. You can check whether you’ve
gotten rid of the gnats by cutting a potato in half and leaving it in
the area. If, after a week, the potato is still clean, your gnat problem
is gone.
newsobserver.com
