Square Foot Gardening

Hi, I'm Tricia, an organic gardener I grow organically, for healthy and safe food supply, for clean and sustainable environment, for an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Gardening may seem overwhelming and over complicated, but today we're going to show you a simple method for gardening that anybody can enjoy and thats square foot gardening. Square foot gardening helps you space efficiently in your garden. It also incorporates growing crops in compost, succession planting, companion planting and crop rotation. To do a square foot garden you need: a four foot wide raise bed, 6 to 12 inches deep, lots of compost and six pieces a four foot bamboo, or some other straight stick, and a measuring tape. If you want to build a trellis include two 7 foot, our longer, pieces of bamboo, Hortonova trellis, and six feet of wire. Your bed should be four feet wide. It can be as long as you want it too, but I'm starting out with a four by four foot square. You also wanna make sure that you're having at least six to eight hours of sun every day. I'll be using these two by sixes cut to four foot lengths and my M-braces to build my bed. If you're building multiple beds make a 1-3 foot aisle in between them. Next go ahead and fill your bed with compost or equal parts compost, vermiculite, and peat moss or coco peat. Square foot gardening takes a lot of compost so it's most cost effective if you make your own. Check out our video on hot composting for details on doing it yourself. Now that our bed is all filled up, we're gonna lay out our bamboo in a grid pattern placing the bamboo every one foot apart. The grid is now comprised of twelve inch squares. Secure the bamboo at the edges or zip tie them at the crosses. You can set up a trellis on the north side of your garden bed like this one and that help support climbers like peas. Now for the fun part, planting the seeds. Check the back of the seed pack for spacing requirements. A spacing and 12 inches mean you can have one plant in square. Six inch spacing translates into four plants in the square. Four inch spacing gives you nine plants per square. The smaller spacing of two inch spacing is 16 plant in one square. Make small depressions at the final spacing if your plants and plant to three seeds per each depression. I'm planting carrots so I'll make sixteen depressions. Rotate your crops in each square. Since I'm growing carrots now in the square, the next thing I plan after harvest the carrots will be something like cole crops or legume crops. An important thing about square foot gardening is to do succession planting. If you want to plant a crop and leave it all summer and not plant anymore than square foot gardening may not be for you. Use the principles companion planting. Add pest deterrent plants like onions, nasturtium, or basil. Something else unique to square foot gardening is the watering. It's recommended that use warm water and you hand water at the base of the plant no overhead watering. Just set a bucket of water out in the sun and let it warm up. Square foot gardening is great for novices or expert gardeners I think you should try it I think you'll like it and organic for life