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The Plot Thickens |
Square-foot gardening offers bigger yields in less space
| by: Andrew Vowles, photos: Vern
McGrath, illustration: Susan Todd |
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| Elisabeth Nicol's
square-foot garden: part of the allure is getting
as much as possible out of her small backyard. |
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| BUMPER
CROP |
Want to create
your own square-foot garden? Mel Bartholomew offers
a few tips:
• Start your garden in an area
that receives full sun at least six hours a day;
• Build the garden in a bed raised six inches
(15 centimetres) and edge with lumber;
•
Divide the space into 16 square-foot blocks, then
fill with a mixture of equal parts compost, peat
moss and coarse vermiculite;
• Plant only
one variety of crop per block. Depending on the
plant’s mature size, plan for one, four, nine
or 16 equally spaced plants per square foot;
• Only plant one or two seeds in each spot,
and do so by making a shallow hole with your finger.
Cover, but do not pack the soil.
• Water
each square as required;
• Harvest continually.
Once a crop in a square is finished, remove a trowelful
of soil and replace it with the same amount of new
compost, then plant something different. |
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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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| READ
PART 2 |
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