Hip To Be Square- intro to Square Foot Gardening

While my garden sleeps under a thick blanket of snow, I too am dreaming.

Dreaming of the many varieties of flowers and foliage will be able to enjoy for the first time, but most importantly, a REAL veggie patch!

I live on a beautiful lakeside ¾ acre property, blessed with no less than 22 mature maples, two 60 foot hemlocks and a half dozen ash, cedar etc.

This dense canopy makes for an uncommonly lush and shady oasis, but negates the possibility of a verdant vegetable garden. I’ve been constrained to leaf lettuce, radishes, certain herbs, and a few struggling bush beans. Tomatoes, peppers and other sun lovers placed in pots in my sunniest spots required hours of TLC just to subsist. I gave up on them after 2 frustrating seasons.

This fall I invested in the services of a professional arborist team, who trimmed and tamed the overgrown forest. Beyond reducing the extent of leaf damage to my roof (and to my back- I spend about 30 hours a year raking millions of maple leaves), this will radically change my garden- what I can grow and where I can grow it.

Men In Trees- Eastern Ontario Tree Care takin' care of business



Now my garden will finally see the light! Looking to maximize the small space I’m willing to allot from flowers to veggies, applying the concept of square foot gardening become obvious.

Square foot gardening is a collection of bio-intensive methods for producing for highest yield with lowest effort.

Click here to see My main reference

MAIN PRINCIPLES:

1. Layout

Raised beds- for easiest accessibility from all sides

Size- constructed in 4’x4’ foot square beds, again so you can reach any part of the bed from any angle. Also discourages over planting. You can plant as many of the 4x4 squares as you wish, depending on how much space you have any how much you want to grow

Layout- the 4X4 squares are further broken down into 1' square blocks. You plant by block, utilising as many blocks as you need for each plant specimen at maturity (indicated on the seed packet as plant spacing. For example, a mature zucchini plant may take up 8 blocks, a mature cabbage would take up 1 block, or beets could be planted 4 to a block.

This method forces frugality in seed planting usage (no more planting hundreds of seeds in endless rows), and negates the need for thinning (wasteful and time consuming!). It also encourages under planting later harvest species (i.e. pumpkins) with smaller earlier species like leaf lettuce or radishes- provided you adhere to the seed to space ratio at all times.

This layout naturally promotes cross-pollination, companion planting, pest deterrence and crop rotation techniques. For instance, one block of onions or garlic (natural pest deterrent) will be within extreme relative proximity to all other species planted in the bed, or adjacent beds, as opposed to large row planting.

Sample square foot garden plan

2. Soil Quality and Care

All gardeners know soil quality is perhaps the most important foundational element to a productive garden. This concept is taken to the extreme with square foot gardening.

Heavy emphasis is place d upon soil preparation, bedding mix, compost usage and planting seeds with a vermiculite mixture.

The soil is never stepped on so as to preserve its airy loamy texture.

The need to weed is drastically reduced by the dense planting and small space allotment overall. All weeding can be quickly done by hand- your tiller, hoe and cultivator can be recycled as garden art.

When harvesting, removed plants are replaced with a handful of dense compost per block.

Proponents say that since you are only caring for your garden by block, the work overall is reduced, and it mentally seems less of an insurmountable chore to plant, weed, water and harvest. You only have to care for as many blocks as need care at the time (or you have energy for), rather than a massive rowed garden that can quickly get ahead of you.

                                                  

I plan to utilise small straw bales (2x2x4) as my raised bed containment system, which I will place in an unused art of my driveway.

If my square foot gardening experiment is a bomb on too many levels, I will amend my perennial beds with the soil in the fall and utilise the straw as winter mulch.

So after a long snowshoe trek, fuelled with Bailey’s-laced coffee; I’ll spend part of this cold and snowy weekend with graph paper and a calculator, plotting my allotments and seed requirements.

And dreaming of spring.

If you have applied square foot gardening principles I would love to hear about your experience...