Tiny Gardens Can Yield Big Benefits
Posted by Unknown in Gardening, Square Foot Gardening on Monday, 13 May 2013
In a single square foot of dirt, you can grow: Four lettuce plants or 16 radishes, 16 onions or nine beets.
A 4-by-4-foot plot, densely and wisely planted, can yield enough produce to feed one person for an entire summer.
Square-foot gardens come in different sizes and arrangements, but there’s one consistency: No space is wasted.
“The key is you
grow your plants so they get right up against each other,” said Larry
Booth, a fan and practitioner of square-foot gardening. “It’s really
amazing how much food you can actually grow in a small area.”
The term
square-foot garden refers to small, tightly-planted, defined-bed garden
plots. The practice was popularized in the early 1980s by gardener and
PBS contributor Mel Bartholomew, who was inspired by the dense and
vibrant gardens of Europe, where residential space is often limited. Its
slightly more academic-sounding cousin, bio-intensive agriculture, is
at the core of sustainable farming efforts worldwide.
Square-foot
gardens — or, SFG — are the urban studio apartments of the gardening
world, so care must be taken in preparation and organization.
Most are larger
than a single square foot, given, but size should not come at the cost
of efficiency and accessibility, Booth said.
“You can make
them as long as you want, but you don’t want them any wider than four
feet across because you can’t reach across to get to your plants,” said
Booth, who maintains a square-foot-garden arrangement at his 20-by-40
plot at Bear Creek Garden. “I try to get as much as I can out of the
garden space.”
In an SFG,
plants are grown so closely together that little light can reach the
soil, so weeds do not grow readily. Less water is used since, with a
greater density of thirsty roots, less water is wasted.
“You’re growing five times as much in the same space as with a regular garden,” Booth said.
Because plants
are contained in beds, foot traffic doesn’t compact the soil in the
growing area. Compacted soil hinders the flow of water and nutrients
from fertilizers, which also work more efficiently in a crowded setting.
With a traditional garden, “you’re fertilizing spaces that nothing’s going to grow on,” Booth said.
Booth plants in the same plot each year and begins his work before the planting season starts — with a diagram.
“I draw out where I will have everything, and each square is a square foot,” Booth said.
He then decides
what to plant, where to plant it and updates the diagram accordingly.
Without a key, it’s easy for a gardener to forget what’s been planted
where, he said.
“If a variety did really well, you’ll want to know for next year so you can plant that same type again,” he said.
Next, Booth
hammers in stakes and runs string lines, re-creating the diagram on a
larger scale. Being able to refer back to the diagram comes in handy
when it’s time to rotate crops.
“As with all gardening, you don’t want to plant the same thing in the same spot each year,” he said.
Certain plants —
such as green beans, squash and cucumbers — can be trained to grow
vertically, wrapping around poles or fences and requiring only a minimal
footprint in the soil bed.
For produce
that grows heartily throughout the season, such as lettuce, Booth likes
to stagger his plantings — with an eye on a long summer full of fresh
salads.
“The main
reason I would recommend square-foot gardening is for the lettuce,”
Booth said. “There’s no comparison between fresh lettuce and what you
get in the store. It’s a completely different animal.”
—
Contact Stephanie Earls: 636-0364
