First Square Foot Gardening Experience

Before I start piling on some posts relevant to the here and now of this year's garden, I wanted to provide some background on it with a post about our gardening experience last year...

We will soon be celebrating the first year anniversary of purchasing our own home...well, since entering into a big debt to purchase our own home.  A big factor in the home we settled was not only its neighborhood and close proximity to where I work, but also its landscaping and gardening space.  It already had a mature apple, cherry, & plum tree with a peach tree nearing maturity.

The previous owners however, while they loved to have beautiful roses all over the property, did not appear to have much of a vegetable garden in place besides a couple grape vines and a strawberry bed from what we could see.  However, it had been vacant and on the market for a year and not as well maintained during that year.  The prime spot for where some vegetables may have been grown at some time was full of nothing but weeds, Holly-Hocks, and hard packed clay.  When we purchased the home, I had already committed to building raised beds knowing some of the benefits they offered.  I was first introduced to using raised beds in a class in high school and have since thought that was the way to go with backyard gardens sitting on lots on at least a 1/4 acre or less.  Once we were able to close on our home, I immediately began looking up information and design ideas for raised bed gardens and it was then that I stumbled across the Square Foot Gardening (SFG) method as engineered and taught by Mel Bartholomew. I checked out his All New Square Foot Gardening book from our local library and explored it some more through blogs and forums.  After pondering the many benefits Mel professed in his book and seeing these benefits proven in pictures, videos, and blogs made by others demonstrating their success with the method, I decided it would be worth the up-front investments.

So with the decision made to garden the SFG way, and in order to get a garden in right away (it was now nearing the end of May), I hastily splurged on 3 to 4 pre-cut raised bed kits at the local Home Depot that were capable of erecting a total of six 4'x4' beds, four of them six inches deep and two of them 10 inches deep.  In addition to the beds, I  purchased some Mel's Mix soil ingredients from the local Home Depot and WalMart.  Mel's Mix is recommended to consist of 1/3 Vermiculite, 1/3 Peat Moss, and 1/3 blend of at least 5 different varieties of compost. 

Before & After

Finished Set up

Unfortunately, things didn't take off as well as I had hoped at the very start.  After the beds were set and filled with the soil mix, we planted out some little watermelon and cantaloupe seedlings that we started in some little Jiffy pellets in our kitchen window.  We also planted in some recently purchased tomato plants and sowed some beans, chard, beets, carrots, radishes, herbs, okra, zucchini  cucumbers, lettuces and spinach among other things.  

To recount, the lettuces and spinach were planted in a stand alone 4'x4' bed, 6 inches deep, that I had placed under the plum tree that is out in the middle of the garden area in hopes that it would provide a bit of shade to protect the delicate greens from the blazing afternoon heat of the sun.  All the lettuce and spinach sprouted, but I think the heat still proved too much for the spinach to handle because it struggled to grow many leaves before it started to bolt for seed.  The lettuces fared much better, but it wasn't long before they weren't happy any more either.  One variety that still did great was Buttercrunch. I made every effort to make sure that bed was getting plenty of water knowing how much those plants would need cooler moist soil. 

Lettuce bed w/ some beans started

Buttercrunch & Romaine

Buttercrunch

It wasn't long however before realizing that Mel's way of taking a cup of sun-warmed water from a nearby bucket and sprinkling it around the base of each plant in each square was not only time-consuming for all the other beds I had, but was also not going to be a viable way to maintain consistent soil moisture for each of the plants in the beds to survive the brutal heat we came to endure last summer, even for heat loving plants like the tomatoes and okra.    

I then began hand watering each bed with a watering wand every morning before work.  While it was a pleasure to get out in the garden early each morning and see the progress of what plants were struggling to come along, this was still a time consuming process each morning. I would soak the surface of the soil and figured that once it started to puddle up, that would be enough to drain through the rest of the soil and give the plant roots the moisture it would need through the day.  As it turns out though, those morning waterings were not penetrating beyond the first inch or two of the soil surface.  Only after several weeks of waiting for carrots to sprout in a deeper 10" bed did I come to realize this when digging my hand down past the first few inches of the soil that had been watered every day for weeks to that point and found the soil to be bone dry below the top couple of inches.  

 I thought I had wet the Mel's Mix I had put together as recommended thoroughly enough before filling the beds with it, but it was then apparent that I didn't.  I then concluded that the carrots, being so close to the surface were probably being cooked and/or dried out with the kind of heat we were already experiencing in June.  I knew carrots were to be grown, or at least started, in more mild temperatures, but thought I could defy the current time of the season as I was with the lettuce, but alas, only one carrot out of a few different squares ever sprouted and grew to a size big enough to eat.

On a little tangent here, but to add to the watering method complications, I was also experiencing some rather viscous pest damage on nearly all of the seedlings that had managed to come up, especially among some beans, cucumbers, and swiss chard. I could never see anything on them during the day though and for a bit was puzzled as to what was eating away at the young plants.  Only after a midnight trip out to the garden did I come to discover a barrage of earwigs practically swarming nearly all the beds and all of the tender young seedlings that were up.  I'll have to go into this story and how eventually won the battle with these reprehensible little pests in a bit more detail in another post.

Earwig damage to a bean leaf

Back on track now... at this time I grew more concerned about how to get the right amount of water into the beds to penetrate the entire root zones of the plants and the whole body of soil without having to stand out there for several hours each morning, which was time I didn't have.  I had researched drip irrigation a little bit but quickly became one of those people who thought it to be too complicated and too costly at first--this has since changed and I'm planning on using drip irrigation throughout my garden this year.  So, I opted to go out and buy some PVC piping and fittings to form a 4' x 4' grid and drilled some small holes in strategic places that would serve as 'drip' emitters.  

It actually worked out quite well in my first test run with it.  I was able to hook up a hose to it and let it run for about a half hour.  Afterwards, I checked the depth of the water penetration and found that the bed I had tested out the watering grid on was consistently moist from the surface all the way through.  Not only did this one watering session serve to keep the bed moist for the rest of the day, but in checking each day thereafter, I found that the soil stayed very nice and damp under the first inch or two of the surface for several days thereafter without receiving new water, even among temperatures reaching 90+ degrees each day.  Impressed with how the grid had worked I was able to build two more grids to serve two other beds that had plants that would accept them.  

Unfortunately, the cost of the PVC fittings to hold these grids together started to add up pretty quickly, especially after all that I had invested int he raised beds and soil mix,  and I wasn't confident how well they'd still work through the rest of the season.  So, I kept it at three grids for three of the 6 beds and figured I could continue to take time to hand water the other three.  Over the season, it became evident that the grids performed remarkably well because the seedlings and plants that were in the grids not only soon started to grow much more rapidly, but thrived and became rather happy and fruitful, though this all occurred much later in the season than I had anticipated.  It also probably helped that I was able to get the earwig infestation under control to enable the seedlings that survived the time they needed to recover.

PVC grid recently used to support trays of lettuce and swiss chard while hardening off

A summer day's harvest of lettuce, radishes, and plums from above

Aside from the square foot garden beds that we had fair to moderate success with last summer given the late start, obstacles, and other circumstances, we also had attempted a 'Three Sisters Garden' with some success in a circular in-ground bed, and also had great success with some sweet corn in a more traditional 4 inch deep 4' x 10' raised bed where we just amended the native clay with some composted steer manure and other compost.  I plan to put up some brief posts that reflect on those successes later on down the road as well.

In my next post however, hopefully later this weekend, I plan to show off the progress of the "remodel" and expansion of last year's garden that I'm currently in the middle of completing for this season.