Books |
The Square Foot Garden: Gardening Made Easy
By
Published: Apr 11, 2022
Category:
Food and Wine
During the pandemic, having enough land for a garden was a status symbol — it meant you’d escaped the urban hellscape and were living the updated version of the good life. Now there’s a more practical reason for a garden — thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there will be global food shortages. Add inflation and supply chain issues, and zucchini will no longer be a bargain. In my youth, “grow your own” meant weed. Now it’s vegetables. The question is: Do you want to break your back growing them?
If you’ll be tending a vast garden, here’s a tool beloved by professionals: the Radius Garden Ergonomic Carbon Steel Digging Fork. “The O-handle grip has four times the gripping surface of a D-handle grip, conforming naturally to the shape of your hands and allowing a secure two-handed grip always.” (To buy it from Amazon, click here.)
If you’re a newbie or a veteran who delights in growing vegetables but doesn’t need another chore on the to-do list, there’s a book: “Square Foot Gardening.”
With above-ground vegetable gardening, you don’t have to twist yourself into poses too tough for a yoga teacher. And the yield per spare foot is crazy, so you can plant many fewer square feet.
Reader mail: “Last summer, at 62, I decided to try gardening for the first time. I followed the Square Foot Gardening method, and the results were fantastic, painless and fun. We ate fresh vegetables all summer and fall from two 4×4 and one 4×6 box… 56 square feet of abundance.”
Reasons for a Square Foot garden?
— Health: The organic food you grow is better for you than any you can buy.
— Spirit: It’s good to reconnect with our ancestral roots.
— Exercise: You will use muscles that don’t get worked out at the gym.
— Economic: It’s vastly cheaper to grow your food than buy it.
— Satisfaction: Watching something small grow into something good.
With Square Foot gardening — planting in raised beds, contained with planks any fool could hammer together — there’s no more digging. No more long rows. Use only as many seeds as you hope will grow, so you don’t have to spend hours on your knees thinning your crop.
The king of this school of gardening is Mel Bartholomew, an engineer who retired in 1975 and took up gardening as a hobby. He had also been an efficiency expert, so he had lots of questions that others might not have dared to ask. Like: Why plant a zillion seeds, only to thin 95% of the young plants a few weeks later? Like: Why plant entire rows of a single crop if you don’t, for example, want 30 cabbages to ripen at the same time? Why leave a 3-foot aisle between rows? Why add compost that doesn’t give you great soil for seven years?
The answers he got were the same each time: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
To a smarty, them’s fightin’ words.
in “All New Square Foot Gardening” Bartholomew breaks gardens down to 12” squares — literally. With proper spacing, that means just four plants per square. By his math, planting in 12” squares instead of long rows saves you 80% of the garden area. To put it bluntly (and he does): “You can grow 100% of the harvest in only 20% of the space.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. And because good habits start young, there is “Square Foot Gardening with Kids.” To buy it from Amazon, click here.]
What does Bartholomew ask of you? Lay out a 4′ by 4′ area, frame it with planks nailed together (and, if you’re so inclined, painted a crisp white). Dig up the top six inches of soil. Mix in peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Now you have a 12” high growing area. Plant it.
Bartholomew shows you how to do everything. When to do it. What tools you’ll need (few). How much work lies ahead (not so much). Everything important gets a big, clear, color photograph. And from the testimonials it really looks as if a few minutes a day can yield a bountiful organic harvest.
“The Vegetable Garden’s Bible,” by Edward C. Smith, is a first cousin to the square-foot method. Smith lives in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont; whenever you read this, it’s probably snowing there right now. Smith is a bigtime gardener — he grows 100 kinds of vegetables in 1,500 square feet — so it’s harder for him to think small. And he does require a bit more of you. (No readymade compost for him, and he likes to dig deep.) But he adopts the raised bed approach. He likes wide rows. He’s organic.
Smith, like Bartholomew, had revelations along the way. “Whenever a plant’s growing space gets wider or deeper or both, its growth improves.” He teaches you how to really read a seed catalogue. He shares useful tips, like planting mint and horseradish — in pots, so they don’t grow wild — to repel cabbage moths and bean beetles. And he takes you through every process, in step-by-step photographs. [To buy the paperback of “The Vegetable Garden’s Bible” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Effortless gardening? Only in those TV commercials that show you how to roll out a carpet of ready-to-sprout flowers or grow tomatoes upside down on a porch.
Nearly effortless? These books show you how. Now you have no excuse not to grow your own.
TOOLS FOR GARDENERS WHO TEND TRADITIONAL GARDENS
ARS HP-300L Needle Nose Fruit Pruners
Nantucket Spider Extra Strength Tick Repellent Spray
BONUS BOOK
The Gardener Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom
Some samples:
John Muir: “Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal.”
Mahatma Gandhi: “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”
Mirabel Osler: Gardening is the one occupation where “if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.”
And this…“As long as we are dirty, we are pure.”
