Lesson 1: Square Foot Gardening Concepts
Key Features of the Square Foot Garden
Square foot gardens follow 4 basic practices. First, you limit the size of your finished garden. This automatically reduces the time you spend planting, fertilizing, weeding and harvesting your garden. It also reduces the amount of money you spend for gardening equipment, seeds, and soil amendments. If you don’t set specific size limits, your garden has a way of expanding throughout the season.
Second, square foot gardens are based on creating four-foot square blocks. The creator of this method suggests one garden block per family member. Each 4 foot-square block is divided into one-foot squares. You install a walking path around each garden block. This prevents you from walking on your garden and compacting the soil.
Each square can hold a different vegetable, herb, or flower, depending on your desires. You will determine how many seeds can be planted in each square by the mature plant’s size. This information is located on the back of seed packages. If you have some seed packages available to you today, take a look at the back of one or more. This topic will be discussed further in Lesson 3.
The third key practice in square foot gardening is to learn to plant only enough seeds for the need. You don’t need to plant 1000 radish seeds just because the package contains that many seeds. This practice goes against everything gardeners have done in the past. Let’s say you can use 16 carrots a week and the crop takes 8 weeks to grow to eating size. You’ll plant the first 16 seeds, spacing them properly, wait a week or two and plant another square to carrots. This staggers your harvest so your carrots are more likely to be harvested in a timely manner. Self-discipline will take some time to develop since this idea really goes against our previous gardening practices.
The fourth practice in square foot gardening is to perform garden maintenance on a square by square basis. It’s much easier to decide that you need to weed your square of radishes than it is to decide you need to weed 16 square feet of garden. It takes only 3 or 4 minutes to weed each square, pick off any bugs, water the plants, and add fertilizer even on the hottest of summer days. Once you get started, it’s really easy to weed the squares adjacent to the one you started with. Limit yourself to whatever you have time for, or even the length of time you can tolerate the temperature. Visit your garden each day and take care of a few squares.
Do you grow cucumbers, squash, or other vines in your gardens? Square foot gardeners use trellises (always situated on north side of the garden square) to save space with these crops. You find more information on this topic in Lesson 2.
If you use some of the practices found in the next lesson section, you’ll find it takes about 20% of the time to maintain your garden that you needed for the traditional style garden. That time savings alone should be enough to convince you that this is the only way to garden.
