The grids will help you to organize your garden for planting and harvesting. You can play around with shapes as much as you like, but ideally, you will separate the whole bed into squares for planning purposes. You can either work with a bed that you already have or make a brand-new one from scratch. Spend a day mapping the sun in your garden before you choose a spot for your square foot garden. This means that your garden is naturally posed to better fight against pests and diseases and avoids nutrient depletion. This gardening method also encourages you to intermix your vegetables. Rather than planting a ton in a row and thinning a majority of them out, you only plant with what you need to fill your grid. With square foot gardening, you’re also less wasteful when it comes to seeds. This also means less soil, compost, and fertilizer needed. You don’t have to worry about watering a large space, instead concentrating your watering on the vegetables in the grid.
This means there is very little space between plants, leading to fewer weeds. In square foot gardening, you plant things very densely. I’m the exact example of that! I have a small urban garden, so I have to get very strategic about what I plant. Not all of us have loads of gardening space to grow vegetables and herbs. Benefits of Square Foot Gardeningīy far, the biggest benefit of planting a square foot garden is its efficiency. Square foot gardens are one of the best ways gardeners with minimal space can get a high yield. You can easily plan how many vegetables take up one grid and when to harvest and replace the grid with more vegetables for a second harvest. In succession planting, you continuously plant throughout the growing season to strategically space out and extend your harvest. Square foot gardening is best paired with succession planting. This grid system makes an extremely efficient way to plan, plant, maintain, and harvest. For example, one large plant like a tomato would take up one grid, while smaller plants like radishes could fit 16 in a grid. Before square foot gardening, the most common practice was to plant rows of vegetables, but Mel believed this to be a big waste of space and seeds.ĭepending on the size of the vegetable, you can place a certain amount in each grid. Square foot gardening utilizes a grid system to pack in vegetables (or other plants) as tightly as possible.Įach grid is one square foot the classic square foot gardening bed measures 4×4 ft for a total of 16 squares. You can grow 4 Swiss chard plants in one square.
Not only that, they tend to have fewer weeds and conserve water by planting densely. Small space gardeners get good yield and a lot of variety with a square foot garden. He wrote a book on the subject, All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated: MORE Projects – NEW Solutions – GROW Vegetables Anywhere. This is a method popularized by Mel Bartholomew, and it’s all about implementing an easy way to grow tons of food in a small space. One method that I want to introduce you to is square foot gardening.
Those who aren’t already growing food in their green space are wondering how they can get started! I’ve been talking a ton about food lately! With rising food costs, it seems to be on everyone’s mind of late.
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