Square Foot Gardening

The Beginning

Published in

Invironment

5 min readApr 23, 2017

I’m already on the path to being a crunchy granola self sustaining hippy prepper. I make kombucha, kefir, ferment and dehydrate food for my family. I’m sure I’ll have some stories around those later, and I’m excited to add canning to the list this fall!

I said in my last post that I listen to a lot of podcasts. One of the things most people on backyard gardening/homesteading podcasts say is “keep a journal”. I have a trusty Moleskine for my notes, but I thought — why not share my experiences with the world?! Below are the past few months of the planning process, leading up to the present day.

February

I’ve been doing some research on gardening, and decided to go with raised beds (as you saw if you read the previous post). Raised beds allow us to use our own soil, not the rock-filled, clay-ridden, tree-rooted soil in our backyard. We have MASSIVE trees in our backyard, so whenever you dig more than about 2 inches, you run into some sort of root. Check it out:

Our backyard last fall. Yes. Our trees filled up that many lawn bags. On In the middle you can see our dog hiding from the camera. I’m sure there will be more photos of him.

I knew that we didn’t want to mess with all of that digging. I did tons research on Google and DuckDuckGo about raised garden beds, planting and whatnot over the course of February and March, and came across the Square Foot Gardening (SFG) method for our crops. It was coined back in the 80’s, and I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it before. Not because I’m an master gardener by any means (I’ve grown herbs and tomatoes in the past, and have helped friends with a community garden plot when I lived in Wisconsin), but because it’s SO efficient! The varieties, the yields! Why would anyone just want to grow tomatoes over the summer when you can grow just about anything, in multiple crop rotations! I’d like to think that one would want to grow as much as they could given the space. Considering our landlord wouldn’t let me take over the entire backyard, I picked a place that would give us enough space for a starter garden.

March

Before we started building and putting this whole thing together, I had to have a plan. One of my old bosses told me — planning is everything! (Thanks Heather!). So I asked my partner what he wanted to eat this year, and of course, his answer was “anything that you grow and make”. [SMH] Great answer. Still, I used several resources, and built a garden plan. Here’s a bit of my plan sketched out — (at the end of this note I’ll also post some resources I used to create my plan)

APRIL 8

First, we made the raised beds. We used cedar untreated wood, because it’s said to last a long time. We then put chicken wire on the bottom, and sealed the beds with a garden barrier to keep out those burrowing creatures as Illinois has quite a bit of them.

April 9

Then, we made our version of “Mel’s Mix” which is 1/3 compost (of several different kinds), 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 peat moss. I wanted to follow the directions, instead of just using several bags of Miracle Gro or other type of potting soil. So I had a crap ton of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite, and mixed them on on a tarp. I measured out the amount we would need to fill (3) 4' x 4' x 10'’ beds.