Square Foot Gardening
The approach I took in my garden’s construction is the “Square Foot” gardening approach. Square foot gardening allows you to maximize production in a small space or with limited resources.
The basic premise of square foot gardening is that you divide the garden into feet and then plant a different plant in each square foot of gardening space, mixing low and high plants as needed. With lower plants and root vegetables like onions and carrots, you can plant 16 in a square foot and then thin them as necessary… or as you eat them if you’re like me and just can’t wait for them to be done. Another benefit is that rotating crops becomes easy — something that becomes important with the long growing periods in Texas.
I chose square foot gardening after following JD’s garden last year at Get Rich Slowly. My situation’s complicated a little bit because I have dogs. Worse, I have big dogs that like to eat things and who dig. That means that my garden can’t just be raised, it needs to be enclosed.
Not my dog, but either of my dogs would TOTALLY do that.
My solution was to enclose the garden in chicken wire on the sides, and to forego being able to walk around on the outside of the beds.
Chicken Wire getting tacked on
Unfortunately, this means that I lost a couple square feet to walkway, and had to use a lot more wood to put the bed up in the first place.
Walkway and square foot markers.
Worse than the dog problems are the bird problems. We have lots of grackles in the area. Grackles will eat just about everything — including the pollenators that are vital to any garden, the fruit itself, seedlings, whole plants, etc. And they’ll peck at something just to see if it’s good to eat. Nothing like a nice beak-mark in the side of your squash. That means that I need to cover the top of the garden, too, with bird netting.
Last, but not least, my yard is pretty much pure clay. If you dig down even an inch you’ll find hard-packed clay … mix it with a little water to loosen it up and stir it well, and it’ll set like concrete in a pot. It’s pretty awesome if you’re sinking fence posts, but not so much if you’re trying to plant in it. Digging down into the soil will cause drainage problems, because they clay forms a nice bathtub that holds all the water unless you put a french drain in the bottom of the bed — which I’ve had to do in two places so far in the yard. The best solution for me, drainage-wise, was a raised bed. There’s just no other way for me to drain a garden this large where I also have full sun unless I run a drain almost all the way to the street.
Books
- Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work by Mel Bartholomew. This is the “original” book on the topic.
- The New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, updated and illustrated. 2006.
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