Trying out Square Foot Gardening
Hard to believe after the harsh winter, but it's planting time again. We are pretty excited because last year by the time we got the garden plot created and planted, it was already fairly late in the season. We are back again at our friends place (Keith & Joni) trying to get some stuff to grow in the city for the second year. Partway through the growing season last year, Kristin brought home the Square Foot Gardening (Mel Bartholomew) book from the library. At first it seemed a bit gimmicky, but when I got into it the concept started making a lot of sense. And it seems perfect for the small plot we have to work with, where growing things in the standard row formation ends up only using about 40% of the useable space.
So this year we bought the latest edition of the book and we are trying the basic concept, although we aren't exactly using his soil mix. We are down in the "3 weeks before last frost" period in Chicago (at least I sure hope so), which means we can actually start planting some early vegetables. So this past Sunday I put my terrible carpentry skills to work and built a grid to lay out on the soil, a trellis for vertical growing using electrical conduit and nylon netting (an idea from the book) and a row cover made with chicken wire to cover 8 of the 1' square plots. Last year we had a lot of trouble with bunnies and/or squirrels (or a vegetarian cat) eating our lettuce, chard and other salad greens. So we are going to try to cover them this year and see if it helps. We are also going to try to grow up (vertical) more than last year to try to take advantage of the limited space AND sunlight in a better way.
We got a variety of greens into the ground and also some seed onions and potatoes. Curious to see how things do. One nice thing about the square foot method is you can start cooler season crops like lettuce early and then when it gets too hot later in the season you plant something else in that 1' square plot and move the lettuce further down in the shade. Kinda cool. We have limited space where we get really good sun and most veggies love sun, so we are trying to make the most of it.