Why I Use Square Foot Gardening Techniques

Good morning, folks! Today, I am going to address a question that I have had many people ask me over the last seven years. They always want to know why I have so much land on my farm but still insist on square foot gardening. It’s a good question, as I live in an area that has been farming since the colonial days and tradition is something that is ingrained in the farmers here.

Large farmers. Big-Agriculture. Men with big machines that do the work for them.

But I am a homesteader. And as a homesteader, I don’t have a big tractor at my disposal for gardening. Yes, I have a lot of land, but most of that still belongs to Mother Nature. Over 75% of my farm is woodlands, and it will stay that way for as long as I can keep it that way. The other 25% is where I homestead.

I grew up in vegetable gardens–my parents’ and my grandparents’. I have had a garden every year since I moved out on my own. I started gardening just like my granddaddy and my dad: in long rows with two-foot wide paths in-between. And I found that I was frustrated all the time.

The whole setup was wrong for me. Super-long strips of beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc that I couldn’t pick in one of my available time allotments. And the paths were just wide enough to get a wheelbarrow down, even the smallest machine (a tiller) was damaging plants if I tried to use it for weeding. The idea is a good one if I’d had a large machine to pick the plants and weed the rows.

I did not.

What I did have was four small kids and a (now ex-) husband who didn’t see the value in gardening and producing our own food.

I would head out the door as soon as the sun started coming up, and I would start harvesting. But I only had until the first child woke up to pick, and my kids were very early risers.

I could never finish a row. Ever.

With some plants, that was fine. I could come back out later and figure out which plant I had stopped on in the tomatoes, squash, zucchinis, and so on. They were big enough to tell immediately.

Beans and peas were a different situation. So I’d leave some sort of marker, hoping to get back out there before it got so hot that I couldn’t work out in it. But sometimes, it would be another day before I got back out there, or two days. And the whole row would be ready to pick again.

And to make it worse, the paths were a lot of wasted space. Empty, uncovered space that weeds just LOVE to grow in. So usually, by the end of July, I had weeds almost as tall as me, even with diligent weeding and sometimes desperate weed-whacking. I couldn’t find the plants, much less harvest them. The weeds would choke them out, and food production for the year would tank.

It was frustrating to no end. All that food was going to waste in the garden because I couldn’t pick it all on my own, and I didn’t have the time I needed to battle the weeds and pick the produce, much less preserve all the produce.

So, I had to do some research and change tactics.

Square Foot Gardening

I ended up with square foot gardening. It was perfect for me and my family. And I added raised beds to it to further maximize our production.

With the raised beds, I was able to create zones for different plants a bit more easily than I could with long rows. This allowed me to keep cooler weather crops towards the side of the garden that became shaded once spring was turning into summer here. Those areas started out sunny enough to get the seeds growing, and once the plants started producing, they were in the shade, which kept most of them from going to seed. I say “most” because North Carolina heat from June until mid-September is enough to make the Devil sigh–cooler weather plants tend to be heat stressed as soon as the sun comes up.

Also, since I made the beds a standard 4 feet wide, I’m able to use most of the row coverings, trellising, and irrigation systems that are on the market. I was also able to heavily wood chip the paths between the beds to keep the weeds suppressed. I have minimal weeds most years (I do not consider many wild plants to be weeds as a lot of them are medicinal and edible. When I say “weeds,” I am referring to crab grasses, nut grasses, and the like.) And if I wood chip it heavily enough, I have a beautiful compost to “top dress” my beds with every year after I add a little processed manure from the animals.

Combine that with the square foot gardening system, and I was finally maximizing my garden’s potential. With square foot gardening, I was sowing my seeds and seedlings very close together, sometimes less than 4 inches apart. Within one square foot (12 inches by 12 inches), I was able to squeeze up to 8 pole bean plants or 4 bush bean plants. If I did that for a 16 foot long bed, I had as many as 128 pole bean plants or 64 bush bean plants.

That’s a lot of beans!

I planted 1 okra plant to a square foot. And for the first time, I had okra bushes, not okra sticks. I’d used the seed plate for okra on the long rows before and it planted the seeds so close together that I only got one stalk, and that one stalk might have produced 8 okra pods. With square foot gardening, those okra had room to spread their wings. This year, even after losing 6 of my 12 plants to the horrible heat wave that we had in late July, I still produced 88 pounds of okra on those 6 plants this year.

88 pounds!

My tomatoes did reasonably well as well. They didn’t perform perfectly because I didn’t have the right kind of tomatoes for a square foot garden. All of my tomatoes were indeterminate varieties, and my vertical trellising system collapsed in the high winds that we got during one of the hurricanes this year. I still managed to get almost 200 pounds of tomatoes off my own vines this year.

I planted 32 plants.

If my trellising system hadn’t collapsed on me, or if I’d been able to repair it, I would have had more tomatoes, but as the plants were laying on the ground and I had no way to get them pulled back up without destroying the plants, I lost a lot of the fruits to bugs, animals, and moisture.

But the lesson was learned. My tomatoes needed a much sturdier trellising system.

Did I still get a lot of food off those 32 plants? Heck yes! But I learned a lot this year, and I will do better next year.

Closing

But that’s what gardening is. It’s a learning experience.

Some years do better than others.

Some years, Mother Nature comes in and messes up all your plans.

But every year is a learning experience. And every year gives you a chance to try something new.

So this year, I learned that I loved square foot gardening, and I love my new raised beds. I also learned that I needed a sturdier trellising system on the southern end of my garden where my tomatoes are. And I also learned that my watering system isn’t quite as strong as I need it to be.

But it’s all baby steps. I’ll fix these small issues over the winter months. I’ll plan my garden out for summer and fall 2023 over the winter. And I’ll pick two new things to implement in my garden. I’ve seen several people implementing fertilizer sprays from fermented weeds. I might give that a try next year. I’m also thinking about adding in a few 2 foot by 2 foot beds for some invasive herb varieties that I want to try to produce myself.

I even have a pineapple in a pot that I am trying to grow.

Every gardening year is a new adventure.

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Grindle Creek Homestead is a homestead in Eastern North Carolina. It is owned and operated by Jessica Cauthon, who has been gardening and preserving food for most of her life. She runs four Medium publications: Around the Homestead — a journal of our day-to-day life on the homestead, Stocking Up — a publication dedicated to canning, freezing, and other means of food preservation, In Stitches — a home for crochet patterns, knitting patterns, and everything crafty, and Down in the Garden — a publication devoted to growing fresh food and being a steward to the land. Grindle Creek can be found online on Payhip and on Facebook.