Square Foot Gardening - Part One

When Darren and I decided to move back to "the country", one of the first things that he mentioned was how badly he wanted to start a garden. I had a bit of hesitation - I could just imagining ME weeding and ME plowing and ME taking care of it. But Darren assured me that this was going to be a partnership and this was going to be OUR garden and it didn't have to be huge. The next week, he made a trip to Barnes and Noble and picked up this really great book on square foot gardening. The basis is to be able to plant a lot of stuff in a small, easily accessible space with little to no weeding.

This is how our garden started! We haven't organized the garage yet, so Darren's tools and tables are not set up yet. He made do by finding an extension cord and pulling everything out into the driveway.

My very handy husband, building our boxes. Each box is a 4' x 4' square (6 inches deep)

The book suggests that a regular family of 3-4 have 3 boxes. 1 for vegetables, 1 for salads and 1 for canning, preserving or giving away.

All 3 boxes set out. It tells you to keep about 3' of space between boxes so you can move around the boxes easily.

After the boxes are in place, you take a weed barrier and roll it out underneath the boxes so that the interior of the box is completely covered.

Darren picked up these handy little plastic stakes to tack the netting down.

After you get the barrier down, the book suggests you pour out all bags of soil (which consists of peat moss, vermiculite and compost) on a tarp to mix well, before you put it into your boxes.

The "manual labor" part of this project really hits home when you have to shovel all of that soil mixture into each of the boxes. Darren and I took turns so it didn't take us that long. You want to fill the boxes all the way to the top.

Here is all three of them filled with the soil mixture!

It's looking good, isn't it??

I'll post the rest of the instructions later!