Square Foot Gardening

Fertility

The first is that the fertility of the soil is critical. You have to pay attention to your feeding. If you put compost on for 15 plants in a 30 square foot gardening area and they grow well, you can’t put the same amount of compost on the same 30 square foot area and expect 30 plants to grow well year after year.

The old timers used to apply two to four pounds of compost per square foot when they grew intensively (or not – that’s just what they applied.) You’ll have to figure out a way to match that with compost or weekly feedings of fish emulsion and compost tea in order to keep your vegetables growing strongly. Yes, you’ll have to do this every year – or rather only in the years that you want your square foot gardening to give you a good harvest. :-)

Watering

The second is that vegetables are mostly water and you can’t crowd plants together and expect them to produce without adding water. Drip irrigation systems are better than overhead sprinklers and mulch is an excellent way to preserve water usage and keep weeds down at the same time. Vegetables and square foot gardening is not xeric or dryland gardening.

Weeds

Keeping weeds down is another reason that proponents of square foot gardening claim it is better. My experience is that if you have bare ground, you have weeds. So shading the ground with leaves will reduce late-summer weed germination rates but not the early ones. You’ll still have to weed that early crop of weeds out unless you have a mulch established.

Plant Spacing

Plant spacing is important in square foot gardening and the rules of spacing are used extensively to create grids of plants rather than rows of plants with wide spaces between them.

For example, if broccoli requires 12 inches between plants in a row then it only makes sense that broccoli can take a plant 12 inches beside it as well. You can grow 4 plants in a square if they are planted 12 inches apart and on the corners of the square. Small crops such as beets and carrots were broadcast sown (scattered carefully and equally over the entire bed.) They were then thinned so that each plant was equidistant from its neighbours but they were not in rows. Note that individual plant spacing is found in the vegetable gardening guide section. Use the “distance apart in the row information” to place your plants in the row and beside each other in your new square foot gardening system.

Do You Want to Grow Vegetables?

The only difficulty with this math formula is with crops such as beans that only require 2-4 inches between individual plants but in rows 24 inches apart. Luckily, the math to figure out something like this is pretty simple as well. In one foot of row, you have three plants at 4 inch spacing or 6 plants at 2 inch spacing. If the rows are two feet apart (each row gets one foot to either side of it) then the 2 feet apart multiplied by one foot of row gives 2 square feet (a plant that is 18 inches apart and 3 foot rows would be 1.5 X 3 = 4.5 square feet each). In our example, each bean plant requires roughly one square foot of growing space at the maximum (plant a foot apart) or to intensify you could cut that in half and plant beans in grids on 6- inch centers (six inches in the row and across the bed). As this is an intensive " square foot gardening " growing system, :-) I would always use the smaller planting space.

Bed Width

My own experience with this square foot gardening system led me to design vegetable beds that were 24-36 inches wide. The wider beds were for the bigger plants such as pumpkins while the narrower beds were filled with carrots and beets and smaller vegetables that took up more hand labour to weed.

This was narrow enough that I could reach into the centre from each side to weed or harvest plants. It was wide enough so I could use a generic 12 to 18-inch spacing on most of my plants with the exception of the very large plants.

Pathways between the beds were also 24 inches so I could get wheelbarrows between the rows. If you don’t use wheelbarrows you can make narrower beds but see the second paragraph below first.

Vertical Gardening

Plants that could be grown vertically such as tomatoes (staked) peas (grown as a vine on fencing) squash/melons etc (grown on a fence) were grown straight up rather than allow them to sprawl and take up space.

Problems

Be aware that this system can create problems as well. It is not the answer at the end of the universe. You can make the paths narrower but in doing so, you start to run into air circulation problems (i.e. no air circulation because of the plant density) and this in turn leads to disease such as botrytis or mildews becoming established. Increasing plant densities also attracts insect pests because the vegetable plants are under more stress (and stressed plants attract pests). Unless you take steps to feed and water appropriately to reduce the plant stress, you’ll find that square foot gardening will create some problems for you.

In my case, I modified my square foot gardening system over the years. I grow my tomatoes up stakes because I get better tomatoes this way. I sowed carrots using a wide bed and broadcast the seed to give me a “stand” of carrots rather than a long row. I place lettuce transplants in squares. I would let the watermelons run like crazy to try to catch the pumpkins and not confine any of them behind the cucumbers.

First Steps

My recommendation on square foot gardening would be to start with some of the basic crops such as salad and those that you’ll eat fresh. Use the system on these. Get the planting row spacing from the guide and plan your garden. Ensure your feeding and watering is excellent. Stake your tomatoes. Once you can grow tomatoes and all your fresh veggies this way, begin to expand the system to other crops that will handle a narrower spacing.

But do be aware that you have to feed, water and care for the plants as much if not more so on this system than on a regular gardening row system. This is one system of intensive gardening, getting more vegetables out of a smaller area with more labor; it is not the answer to a gardening maiden’s prayer of reduced work and increased yields.

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