Bypassing the ordinary implements in her potting shed, Elisabeth Nicol picks up one tool that has proven indispensable in her garden in downtown Guelph, Ontario: a tape measure. It's not for keeping track of the growth rates of her vegetables-that would be a bit optimistic for a mid-May morning. Rather, she's eager to demonstrate the first rule of square-foot gardening. And sure enough, the tape confirms that each section in the string grid marking off her raised beds measures an unequivocal 12 by 12 inches (30 by 30 centimetres). Standing and smiling, Elisabeth lets the tape snap back into its housing with a decisive click.
“Square-foot gardening: People who work the earth a foot at a time!” That's the rallying cry on one popular American Web site for practitioners of the intensive gardening method conceived of almost 30 years ago by Mel Bartholomew, a retired civil engineer. Bartholomew came up with the concept as an alternative to what he considered to be the wasteful, inefficient practices used at a community garden in his native New York State. His 1981 book, Square Foot Gardening, is still the bible for an active fraternity both in the United States and in Canada. His main commandments? Think not in rows but in squares, and within those squares plant a prescribed number of seedlings. Then, link 16 of those squares in a four-by-four-foot (1.2-metre-by-1.2-metre) grid, and you get an optimum-sized bed that takes up about one-fifth of the space of a conventional vegetable patch but that, with proper management, can provide a harvest throughout the growing season.
Elisabeth adopted the system four years ago while implementing a new landscape design for her small back garden with its three brick-encased raised beds, each precisely six feet (1.8 metres) long and four feet (1.2 metres) wide. By spring, she already has spinach, lettuce, snow peas, carrots, radishes, Roma tomatoes, beets and Swiss chard tucked into her outdoor checkerboard. “I like the structure. It's organized, it's laid out on a grid,” says Elisabeth, a physics professor at the University of Guelph. Conceding that Bartholomew would use four-by-four-foot beds and likely only two of them to plant enough vegetables for her and her husband, John, she adds, “Of course, I don't follow the rules exactly.”
For Elisabeth, part of the allure of square-foot gardening is the challenge of getting as much as she can get out of a small space. Among her square-footer practices or adaptations:
• After harvesting spring vegetables such as spinach and Swiss chard, Elisabeth plants carrots and bush beans in the empty spaces. But she has found that hot, humid summers make succession planting iffy later in the season.
• Although she generally follows Bartholomew's formula for planting density, Elisabeth often slips in a few more seeds or seedlings as added insurance against slugs and cutworms.
• Rather than ordinary vegetable cages, she aims for more compact growth of tomatoes by using six-foot (1.8-metre) spiral metal stakes. (Bartholomew even recommends growing climbers up a fence to save precious gardening space.)
• Breaking a square-footer rule, Elisabeth allows her butternut and buttercup squash to sprawl over a couple of adjacent squares-after harvesting something else from those squares first.
• Because she's reluctant to cede valuable space in her beds, Elisabeth has used one of her three compost bins as her potato “bed.” She empties the bin to a certain depth, plants the potatoes, then in-fills throughout the summer.
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