Square-foot gardening

Located steps from the back door, Elisabeth's garden is easy to check for pests and disease during the morning rounds. Crouching on the flagstone walkway separating two beds, she demonstrates how all 24 squares lie within arm's reach. The technique makes watering and weeding easier, and the closely growing foliage helps to conserve soil moisture and discourage weeds. She collects water in a rain barrel, then uses a small saucepan to water the vegetables. Even during the height of the growing season, Elisabeth estimates that she spends less than an hour a week weeding and watering. To deter larger pests such as squirrels from nibbling away at her crops, she makes cages by bending two one-by-three-foot (30-by-90-centimetre) pieces of wire mesh into C-shapes, then nesting them to cover one square. (The cages may be draped with cloth in summer or plastic in spring.) To protect plants against spring frost, she uses clear, pyramid-shaped cones made of plastic that fit perfectly over a single square.

Bill Missen of Sherwood Park, Alberta, first considered planting a square-foot garden about 10 years ago. “A former neighbour had these weird-looking square beds. He always seemed to get a lot of food out of them,” says Bill, a locomotive engineer who is often riding the rails. “You can maintain a really decent garden, and it doesn't overrun your life.” Three years ago, he built three beds raised 12 inches high (30 centimetres), each in the classic four-by-four-foot grid, as well as a 20-foot-long (six-metre-long) bed for mixed vegetables and ornamentals. Following Bartholomew's recommended planting densities per plant type, Bill grows peas, beets, carrots, beans, tomatoes and peppers, using trellises alongside two beds for climbers. He practises both companion and rotation planting. “With three beds, we have a potential for two years' rest before a plant returns to its original bed. This will help keep the pests and viruses from getting a chance to propagate every year in the same soil.” He likes the low-maintenance aspect of the system, including no thinning, and small beds that make it easy to keep an eye out for intruders. “There's not a weed in the bed bigger than a quarter-inch. If I see a weed, it's history.”

A physicist, two engineers: Does its logical, stepwise format make square-foot gardening the preserve of strictly right-brain types?

“I'm not really a scientific brain at all,” says marketing consultant Sarah Moore. Conserving space is hardly an issue on her 70,000-square-foot (6,300-square-metre) spread of virgin forest and scrub in Entrelacs, Quebec, 90 kilometres north of Montreal. However, she wanted to carve out only as much room as she needed for a kitchen garden. She began last year by building eight beds, each raised between nine and 12 inches (23 to 30 centimetres), measuring about four-by-2.5 feet (1.2 metres by 76 centimetres) and separated by 18-inch-wide (46-centimetre-wide) paths. “It looks neat and tidy without a lot of effort, which I like.” The square-foot promise of easy maintenance appealed to this self-confessed “lazy” gardener. “The thing about not having to weed because everything is planted so closely is true,” says Sarah, adding that the area adjacent to her garden “is green all over with all sorts of foul things.” For a couple of her beds, Sarah followed Bartholomew's directions on soil mix (see “Souped-up Soil,”) but found that to be too expensive. Her modified recipe includes peat, lots of compost and topsoil. She grows radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, runner and bush beans, broccoli, carrots and corn. Sarah's goal: to cut by half the amount of produce the family buys from the local grocery store.

These gardeners are following the square-foot method more or less by the book, but Toronto horticulturist Judith Adam says many others are likely using the same principles implicitly in small spaces, from a small roof garden to a narrow strip of soil, even a discarded canoe or bathtub. “An old cold frame is very convenient for turning into a square-foot garden,” she says. In what might be termed “round-foot” gardening, she fills containers with a special soil mix and tight plantings of tomatoes, beans and herbs. “That's very careful management, and square foot for sure.”