Square foot gardening results

Seriously: DAMN.

Everything grew like CRAZY.

I built a 4x8 box and filled it with 10 inches of vermiculite, peat, and compost.

The last two feet of the box I devoted to asparagus, and that's dormant right now.

The remaining six feet hosted 12 lettuce/arugula plants, 12 spinach plants, 6 collards, and 6 cauliflower plants, as well as a brazilian onion sets. (My thinking was that I could grow longer term onions and asparagus in the same box with short-term crops, and by the time the longer-term plants got big, I could just gradually phase out the shorter-term stuff.)

BEAR IN MIND that I was originally planning to put broccoli in the box as well, but I could not find any little plants.

And how did having 36++ plants in a 6x4 foot area work?

It worked beyond my wildest expectations.

I am officially a convert.

Seriously, it required very little watering and I only found two weeds, which I promptly pulled. I'm a bit of a lazy gardener, so I spent about 10 minutes a week out there watering and doing other maintenance tasks.

I found one slug-damaged cauliflower, but I cut out the parts the slug ate. Mr. Slug went down the garbage disposal. The rest of the cauliflowers were big, happy, and delicious. The spinach had a few bugs, but nothing horrible. The lettuce grew and grew and grew and grew, and finally in the last week it flowered (!) and I yanked most of the plants today. The collards are still going strong. The onions are small but growing. The asparagus? We will see about that later. (Note well: the low temperature this winter *so far* has been about 25 degrees, and all the plants just kept on rolling.)

Everything we have tried to plant in the ground before the slugs and snails have DESTROYED, so we had basically given up on lettuce and other tender plants before this. Cauliflower is supposedly impossible here, but we proved the critics wrong. Also, the garden has been taken over by Bermuda grass and morning glories, making gardening a challenge to say the least. We put down weed cloth, which so far is keeping the weeds under control. The Bermuda grass is growing around the edges of the weed cloth and is easy to control.

I also think it's important to state here that we have rich silty clay loam soil (so rich that most native xeric plants just DIE catastrophically), and we are on the floodplain of the Sacramento River, so part of my initial skepticism about this method was toward whether the square foot garden mix would outperform the native soil. It did. I am officially a believer. (And I have a B.S. in soil science, so my skepticism was STRONG.)

If I had to do it over again, I would have put in more asparagus intercropped with the short-term plants. I don't think we're going to see any of that action on the table until next year. I also would have built another box at the same time, and a month after planting the first round, I would have put in a second round and planted the exact same things so that I could have a more protracted harvest season.

Today I put in half of the "spring" crop, which will be more lettuce and some broccoli.

I intend to build at least three more boxes of the same size to keep the party going strong through the spring and summer. Tomatoes are happy in the ground here, but everything else will be grown square-foot style from now on. :)

the prior owner had but a little brick border around a pecan tree that promptly died when I bought the house 7 years ago. Since then, I've left it alone, so lots of weird stuff was growing there. I got my garden guy to just clean it out & now I'm having fun filling it in with peat & compost. Once that's done, I'll mark it off & grow tomatoes & squash to my heart's content. I've got some broccoli going in another part of the yard (another area the prior owner put a brick border around for a reason now lost to time) & hope to have that harvested soon. :)

dg

It's a wonderful method. I'm glad it worked so well for you.
Have you ever tried Sluggo for the slugs? It's nontoxic.

Try some pole beans on a trellis. The SFG website shows how to make one. I made 3 trellises out of metal electrical conduit for cucumbers, pole beans and tomatoes. I'm going to add another trellis in my 4th square-foot bed this spring. Training cucumbers and tomatoes to grow up lengths of clothesline is a great way to keep them off the soil. It makes them very easy to harvest, and it's good for spotting pests.

My square foot beds are in the ground, surrounded by cinderblocks and brick paths. Then there's a 6-foot fence of bird netting on those green metal fence poles to keep the deer out. Otherwise they would eat everything. I dug out the heavy clay to a depth of 18 inches and replaced it with the square foot mix, adding some more every year. Soon I'll be covering the beds with clear heavy plastic to solarize them to kill weeds and pests.

Bermuda grass will let me repeat WILL grow through weed cloth. Here's a simple way to keep it under control and destroy it in the process.

Newspapers, layer upon layers of newspapers. I'm speaking from experience. I read about it sometime ago and decided what do I have to lose, it's only newspapers after all. So, I placed very thick layers of newspapers down where I wanted to grow squash. We had a great crop and the Bermuda grass was under control and died out.

Give it a try, if the Bermuda grass is growing around your garden box, then place the newspapers along the outside and dump some soil on top of that and grow flowers that will attract butterflies, ladybugs and other beneficial insects. Or just add rocks on top of the newspapers, so they don't blow away.


I'm glad your container garden yielded you great results.

I've been digging it out little-by-little, but it's everywhere. :cry: