Square foot gardening - why for, how come?

I'd never heard of square-foot gardening (what it's supposed to look like, above) until my wife, Kristy, announced that it was what we should do. We wanted to take our home food production to the next level, which in this case meant, you know, a level. Any level. Trudging to the grocery store every couple of weeks to replace the broccoli we had to throw out because we never got around to eating it didn't count. But how?

Our house is in the city, and while we have a decent-sized yard it's not conducive to long rows of corn and beans. Almost all of our limited flat, open space is used by the dogs for their dirty, sinful outside business, and I'd already served notice that Chloe (right, protecting our friend Ben at the Green River) digging up my tender young vegetable seedlings on top of her proclivity for murdering possums and peeing in the floor every couple of weeks for no reason whatsoever could mean new living arrangements for one of us. So Kristy found square-foot gardening. Apparently, it's all the rage, man.

The idea is sensible: You theoretically can grow a lot in a small amount of space. Maintenance is minimal. Your biggest problem will be what to do with all the damn food. We could have built our own square-foot garden, it has been suggested, but if I'd "built" it it would have been a square-anywhere-from-8-to-14-inch abomination against geometry requiring wood that could be bent into a half-circle. I'm not a carpenter.

So we bought two, coming in pre-cut cedar. They were much too expensive, but all of the angles are 90 degrees. Can you really put a price on that? We also purchased All New Square Foot Gardening. It has charts and graphs and tips out the wazoo, which is to be expected, I guess, from "The Book That Changed The Gardening World!"

But why the whole square-foot thing? Well, author Mel Bartholomew tells you. And tells you. It gets rather tiresome, actually, but to him it's a critical part of maintaining the organization that makes square-foot gardening, well, square-foot gardening. For instance, one tomato plants fits on one square foot. Four bell peppers should fit in one square foot. Twelve radishes. Etc. Etc. If I can ever get anything to grow, I'll let you know if he's right.

Bartholomew also argues that traditional gardening, with its rows and tilling and weeding, is actually a really inefficient use of time and space. I helped my grandfather with his quarter-acre plot from the time to time, and while I loved it I have to agree. Your life is dedicated to fighting weeds, and even then you will likely lose. Those bastards just don't give up. It's like they want to live or something. You will also lose a lot of dirt when it rains because without said weeds the topsoil runs free like a 5-year-old in Chuck E. Cheese. Most of the garden space goes not to vegetable-producing plants but area for you to walk around muttering to yourself.

In a square-foot garden, everything's right there. You monitor your soil completely, and a barrier underneath prevents any other plants from trying to horn in on the action. Most importantly to me and my dreams of an organic garden, there's also an opportunity to control insect pests with plants that naturally repel said insect pests. At least, that's supposed to happen. I'm not sure what my marigolds would have repelled last year because the slugs, all hopped up on goofballs because of the thousand inches of rain we got, devoured them nearly as fast as I could plant them. Christ. I thought slugs were supposed to be slow. (Note to self: This year, look for a plant that repels slugs. I'm sure that plant, whatever it is, will attract killer bees or something, but I'll cross that bridge if I survive long enough to get to it).

Anyway. That's a brief history of why we are aspiring to be square-foot gardeners. I say aspiring because right now I'm more of a square-foot dirt gazer. Chin up, Ron, chin up ...

Next week: Preparing for the move.

A confession

I have several reputations among those who know me, and while there's no point detailing the full list of awesomeness among other things I am known as a grower of plants. My yard blooms from March until October. I know the names of things. In the winter, our house is packed so full palms. succulents, cacti, African violets, orchids and impatience that keep coming up from seed accidentally that our living space is cut by about 40 percent.

Yep, I am the envy of those who inexplicably can't keep a peace lily alive (uhhh, have you tried watering the damn thing and taking it out of the closet?). But I have a confession to make, one that shames and humbles me and has made me determined to turn over a new leaf this year (get it? Turn over a new leaf in a blog about plants? Shut up.): See that up there? That's the pathetic excuse of a square-foot garden I've tried to grow for the past two years. It has been. An. Unmitigated. Disaster. If this were 1850 Kansas, the Indians (sorry, Native Americans) wouldn't have bothered tomahawking me to death in some dramatic, unnecessarily yelly fashion. They just would have lazily chewed bison jerky and laughed and laughed from a nearby ridge as my family and I starved to death. If their culture understood the concept of money, I'm sure somebody could have made a pretty penny charging admission (and, yeah, that's a dig back at you asshole, fictitious Indians reveling in my imaginary plight. USA! USA!)

(see that down there? It's kale that has managed to survive our brutal winter, a nasty case of cabbage worms and my general ineptitude. I don't have the heart to eat it)



Anyway, the point is, I've grown enough food to create perhaps three meals. Three awful, awful meals. Tomatoes have done OK. Like, five stubby carrots that took two years to grow instead of the, you know, one summer (on the plus side, somehow they survived the winter. In your face, warning on seed packet). A pretty decent batch of cucumbers this past summer thanks 100 percent to my wife, who by her own admission wouldn't know an azalea from a crape myrtle. I know, right? About four potatoes. Three face-shrivelingly bitter stalks of celery. All wrapped around a trail of plant death and destruction that, if nothing else, has prepared me for the impending doom of 2012.

Why? Why has it been so difficult? I have several theories.

1. Vegetable plants are pussies. They can't take anything. Too dry? Dead. Too much water? too hot? Dead. Too cold? Dead. Too little sun? Dead. My usual plan - buy something native, plant it at the right time in the right spot, water it that first year if it needs it and sit back and enjoy - is woefully inadequate for the delicate needs of these candy-asses. There's a reason most gardens are full of corn and squash - they're relatively low maintenance. I hate corn and squash, however.
2. People aren't the only things that like vegetable plants. Bugs do, too, and they'll make damn quick work of your dreams. I'm talking, like, a day if cabbage worms show up and less than a week for cucumber beetles. Dude, I'd never even HEARD of a cabbage worm until I planted some kale on a Tuesday, and on Thursday the only kale left were some green stalks. "That doesn't seem right," I thought, and careful examination revealed these innocent-looking, caterpillars colored exactly like the plant they were devouring. Several questions came to mind, like how the fuck cabbage worms found my cabbage since, as near as I can tell, there isn't any other growing cabbage within five miles of my house, but that's another post. The point is, these kinds of things are lurking everywhere. Who knew? I mean, besides every generation before this one? Hey, hey ... don't get too cocky, grandpa - I'm not afraid to use self-checkout at the grocery store.
3. Like real estate, a garden site is all about location, location, location. And my decision to put ours right next to our house on the shady side of a silver maple (left) on steroids makes me very glad I never decided to invest our life savings into developing property I picked out myself. As noted earlier, food-producing plants just don't do well with competition for sunlight. A solid structure blocking said sun after 2 p.m. and a giant tree blocking it before is pretty much the antithesis of that. Sigh. Cute little garden off the back deck is another dead dream.
4. Don't get cocky. In the pictures the diagrams, you can grow, like, ANYTHING in square-foot gardens! Radishes and artichokes and bell peppers and potatoes and onions and carrots and lettuce and broccoli - you're only limited by your imagination! Just stick the seedling in a hole and prepare for the harvest! Yeah, right. The realty is all of these plants require different things. And if you don't know what the hell you're doing to begin with, you will never be able to understand the nuances of what it takes to make all of them grow and produce individually.
5. Seedlings need light, like, immediately, so that sort-of bright spot in the corner of the laundry room isn't going to cut it. Oh, and you shouldn't scrimp on a decent planting mix in favor of that random dirt you haven't used yet in the corner of the garage. The former leads to desperate, pale shoots that invest all of their limited carbohydrates into a frantic, leggy push for the window that ends in death. The latter leads to Sahara-like conditions after a day of not watering which leads to, you guessed it, death.

So. What have we learned? Well, I've been planting the wrong things in the wrong spots and then not taking care of them correctly. So except for utter ineptitude, I think I'm in good shape. But it's a new year, a new decade - and a new farmer on the block. My pickled okra will be the envy of all. You just wait and see.

Coming next week: What's a square-foot garden anyway?