Digging the square foot.

What a difference the sun makes – to the garden, to my mood, to my ability to get stuff done around the house. Not to mention the ability to eat dinner outside in the garden again! After painting my new/old bike last night, B. and I had a lovely drink of beer and a meal in the yard as the day cooled down. Best thing about June is no bugs (well unless you count the aphids that have been appearing on some of my plants).

Three months into the west-coast growing season, I am feeling pretty good about my garden output. The broad beans have started to fruit, I’ve got beets that are almost at edible size, and almost every night I cook three or four kinds of greens in our dinner (last night was beet greens, spinach, chervil and parsley). Pretty much everything I’ve planted (with the exception of a few things I put out too early) is coming up lush and full and I’ve got to say that I am totally sold on the square-foot gardening method as a way to manage my planting, harvesting and renewing the soil.

The photo above is one of six of my 4×4-square foot boxes, and is pretty typical in terms of the diversity of what’s planted there: four raddichio, nine joi choi, four swiss chards, two kales (in a square each), sixteen scallions, nine spinach, one cabbage, nine beets plus a bunch of stuff that is still seed (I planted on Saturday again). The reason I can give numbers of plants with such precision here is not only because of the photo, but because each square foot has a recommended spacing for various vegetables. The small plot sizes (1 square foot) coupled with the square foot spacing chart helps me waste less seed, and less time thinning than I have in gardens past. Not only that but the use of a nutrition-rich soil blend, and the warmer raised beds allow for a more intensive planting – and thus greater harvests.

Once a square is “finished”, as most of my radish squares are now, it’s a quick stir-in of some more compost and then the next round of planting begins – not to mention the smaller squares (as opposed to long rows) make succession and staggered planting a lot easier to manage. A lot less intimidating to go out to seed one or two squares! I often find myself just spur-of-the moment deciding to plant another crop of something when I’m otherwise not in planting mode at all – it’s just no effort.

Of course, this doesn’t work for every plant – particularly those large tomato and potato plants that like lots of space. While it is possible to just give them more square feet and change the grids on the boxes accordingly, I decided to plant my potatoes in burlap sacks (above) and have tucked tomatoes all over. In the photo – right – there are five visible tomato plants – one hanging upside down, one in a planter on the patio, and three in the beds along the edges. There are at least four other tomato plants tucked around the edges of the garden where they could have a little more space than if I was trying to grow them intensively in one of the boxes.

We’ll see how it all turns out, but so far so good. We’re eating out of the garden every night, and I love the visual appeal of the raised beds spilling vegetables out of their sides. When we put this in last fall I wasn’t sure how it would work, but now that we are seeing the true gardening season emerge I am becoming a real square-foot garden convert!