Gardening by the foot

Like baseball fans, gardeners literally "spring" back, undeterred by memories of last year's disappointments. This year, we are adopting a new approach to edibles - square foot gardening, as described by Mel Bartholomew in his book All New Square Foot Gardening. Mel wrote the first Square Foot Gardening book in 1981 and has been tweaking the method ever since. He also offers loads of practical advice on his website.

The basic idea is to grow more, in less space and with less work. (No, he doesn't promise you'll loose 10 lbs, too. That would make it too good to be true). Planting in raised beds filled with garden soil made with Mel's own recipe is the main strategy here. We purchased our raise bed from Rebuild, a nonprofit in Springfield, Va., that recycles used building materials. It is sitting on pieces of slate and Larry added the cedar planks along the top edge as a place to rest tools and bottoms.

Our raised bed is made of recycled 2x8s

The bed is filled with Mel's mix, a lovely, loose-structured gardening soil made up of equal parts peat moss, compost, and course vermiculite. Since our box is so deep, we made two batches, mixing the ingredients on a large plastic tarp. Both the peat moss and the vermiculite are very light and dusty, so we wore masks and picked a not-so-windy day on which to do the mixing.

Peat moss is readily available at the big box stores, and we located the vermiculite at a full service garden center. Mel recommends blending compost from two different sources, so we combined a bag of commercial compost with some from our own pile.

For the grids, we bought plastic lath, cut it to fit and used Liquid Nails to glue the joints. Why the grids? Good question, and the subject of a future post.