Lesson 1: Square Foot Gardening Concepts
Special Practices in the Square Foot Garden
Companion planting. Organic gardeners use companion plants to avoid many pest problems. One problem is always to determine the proper spacing for these companion plants. Fortunately, within the confines of a 16 square foot garden, it really doesn’t matter which squares you use for these companion plants. They will always be close to the plants they are used to protect. Review these websites for further information on this topic:
Companion Planting: Basic Concept and Resources. This website presents the scientific basis for companion planting.
Companion planting is often considered nothing more than folklore by those who don’t garden organically. I challenge you to do your own reading on this subject and decide whether it will decrease your garden problems.
Crop rotation. Every farmer knows that you must rotate crops or you risk the build-up of disease organisms in the soil. Commercial farmers make multiple-year growing plans to insure that they don’t plant the same crops on the same acre of land for successive years. This requires knowledge of which crops are related to each other. Crop rotation also prevents running out of the nutrients needed for the crop. It gives the nutrients a chance to build up in the soil again.
The Oregon State University extension service suggests a 4 year rotation:
1st year: plant with root crops (carrots, radishes, etc.)
2nd year: plant leaf, seed or fruit crops such as lettuce, green peppers, and corn
3rd year: plant anything from the cabbage family
4th year: plant legumes which help to fix nitrogen in the soil, thereby restoring the level of this nutrient in your garden.
According to The Gardener’s Network, Purdue University says that pumpkins should not be replanted in the same location for 7 years. This may be a slight problem for any home gardener, including those practicing the square foot method.
Alabama A & M and Auburn University suggest the same crop not be planted in the same location just two years in a row. They also provide a list of 6 groups of crops that should be rotated.
Please check with your local extension agents or local garden centers to learn what crop rotations are suggested for your specific location and soil type. As you can see with the examples given above, there is some disagreement about the frequency of rotation.
Square foot gardening should eliminate most of the concern about rotating crops. If you have just one four-foot square garden, you have only a 1 in 16 likelihood of replanting the same crop in each square two years in a row. Use whichever list of recommendations you prefer if you want to be sure you are properly rotating your crops.
Succession planting. This is the practice of keeping any single square planted to some crop throughout the total gardening season. Typically, you would start with a cool-growing crop such as leaf lettuce that prefers spring growing. After this crop is harvested, you plant it to peppers or tomatoes. If you have a long growing season, you may be able to squeeze in another cool-growing crop during the fall. This means that one square foot in your garden produced 3 crops for you.
Interplanting. Do you remember the Echinacea plant I mentioned earlier? It requires a block of 4 squares when it reaches maturity. The first year, it will only take about 1/3 of the space allotted for the full-size plant. What do you do with the extra space? Simple, plant crops such as radishes, leaf lettuce, or even turnips for the first year or two, depending on how long it takes the Echinacea to achieve its full growth. You can do the same thing with crops that mature in one year. Just surround them with short-season crops. Once you have harvested the short-season crop, the other crop will have filled the space.
Companion planting, crop rotation, succession planting, and Interplanting are techniques that originated in traditional gardening. They are equally valuable in square foot gardening.
