Our square foot gardening adventures

Adventures?  Sure, why not.  I'm going to attempt to explain this in an easy way. 

We like to go to a hardware store and buy 2 2x8's, cut them into 4 foot lengths there and bring them home.  If we are having a bit of foresight we buy a bag of vermiculite (the 2 cu. ft.) a bale of peat moss (the 4 cu. ft.) and 3 cu. ft. of composted manure.  Technically, experts call for 3 cu ft of each, but its not sold in those quantities around here, so we fake it.  Last year we did just fine with this mix.

Then we bring the lumber home, drag out the deck screws and drill and put the frame together.  Buy deck screws when you are at Lowe's if you don't have a ridiculous quantity of them hanging around your house. 

We measured out where we wanted this frame and placed it in the yard.  We'll let it sit here long enough to yellow the grass under the frame so that we know exactly where we want to install the garden.  This saves on painting lines in the yard, and give a natural outline when we pick it up to dig.  You don't have to dig out the grass, and instead you can place a layer of weed block under the frame, but we liked the idea of having the natural (though poor) soil available under the garden, in case anything we grow gets super ambitious.

That's hard work, which is why I'm taking a picture instead of picking up the shovel laying next to the wheelbarrow. 

This is what it looks like with the aforementioned soil mixture.

We used clothes line to mark out our 4x4 grid.  We had some laying around in the cabinet.  We have friends who have used the metal slats from old miniblinds to make a grid, and you can always use something like wood slats from the store to make your grid too.  Just be sure to mark out a grid before you plant, it makes it easier, and you waste less of your space.

This is last year's garden right after we planted the starts.  We got a late start so we didn't bother to try to start any seeds.  Can I say "start" any more in this paragraph?  Start the starts and start now.  Or whatever works for your area. Start, start, start...

We ended up discovering that we shouldn't grow corn.  It's a huge space hog, and ours rotted on the ear anyway.  It costs more for us to grow corn than it does to buy it at the store.  Other people may have better luck with it than we did.  Last year we grew squash, pumpkin, zucchini, corn, peppers, rosemary, basil, thyme, strawberries, head lettuce (another failure), leaf lettuce (grew great), watermelon and marigolds in the bed.  We learned that 2 zucchini will take over 1/4 of the bed, so if you plant them, plant one and make certain you have a vining kind that can be trained.  This year our second bed will be the home to the vining squashes, where we will train the vines to grow in a less trafficked areas.

Now, we have cats, and if you do too, I suggest covering the bed soon after your final harvest and cleanup, anything wintering over (we wintered over strawberries), can be left out from the cover, but really, these are just too tempting to cats to be left open.  Our cats do ok, and generally stay out of the garden once we plant and water it, but as long as they see bare, dry soil, they think we have installed the world's best catbox.  We covered ours with some leftover lumber last year.  In a fit of spring fever, I pulled the covering off and then realized that we needed to recover it until planting.  We put black plastic over it, which will help to warm the ground too, making seeds germinate better when we plant our carrots and the other things we'll plant from seed this year (we'll cover those areas to keep the cats out when we do plant).

As you can see, our strawberry square is uncovered (and our grass is sparse, until it recovers from winter.  It will look great again by May, when the snow stops falling at random intervals).