Showing posts with label Square Foot Gardening. Show all posts
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
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
