In this post I’ll describe our build process for our square foot garden.
Materials:
- 2 2x10x8 untreated boards
- 20+ 3” wood screws
- 4 7” pieces 2x4 for reinforcing corners
- 6 bags composted cow manure (cow poop)
- 1 compressed bag peat moss
- 2 small bags perlite + 3 small bags vermiculite
- 3 bags top soil
The build process is relatively straightforward. You will be building a square. First 
you will need to cut each of the 2x10s in half. Once the boards have been cut you will need to secure them together with the 3” wood screws. After completing the initial join used small 7” pieces of 2x4 to reinforce the joints. Once the box is built you can stain the outside to help it blend in with your landscaping if you wish. We had some old stain laying around and after a couple of coats the boards looked much more appealing than the blond pine. One addition we made to the box design was to staple some sheets of landscape cloth to the bottom of the box. We did this for 2 reasons: 1) to prevent soil from seeping out under the edges 2) to prevent unwanted plants from growing up into the soil from the bottom.
Lacking a 10+ cubic foot blender we used a tarp on the drive way to mix the soil ingredients together. We used a slight variation to Mel’s Mix detailed on the Square Foot Gardening website. I could not find the coarse vermiculite, so I used 3 bags fine vermiculite (all the store had) and 2 bags perlite. After filling the box I felt we needed just a little more soil so we added several generic bags of top soil from the local nursery.
The final step before planting is to lay out a grid. I drove 3 screws into each side of the box to allow me to create a grid using basic garden twine. 
Once the screws were driven into the sides I ran the first set of lines. As I ran the second set of lines I made sure that as each of the new lines crossed the original lines I wrapped the new line around the existing to make a tight join.
With our square foot garden built and in place it was now time to choose the plants we would be growing. My next post will review the plants we choose and how we laid them out in the grid.
This will be the first of what I hope to be several posts related to my families experiences gardening in a small grid. We are not expert gardeners, in particular we aren’t experts with the method of gardening we are choosing to utilize. I hope our experiences may just prove useful to someone else living in an urban environment that desires to have a slightly larger garden than the pots and containers were allowing us to have.
After reading Scott Hanselmans’s recent post on sq. ft. gardening and then reviewing the thorough documentation found on the square foot gardening website my family and I decided to build a sq. ft. garden yesterday. We have been wanting a “better” garden for years, but given our current home’s location and lack it’s lack of sunny backyard flower beds we thought we’d never get to have a larger garden. Our first house had a small back yard, but there was 1 corner of that yard that got sun 8+ hours a day and had great soil, so we were spoiled. Our next two homes did not have locations like that, and we missed the yields that original garden produced. We have also recently had our first child and wanted to involve her in gardening because we both had fond memories of fresh vegetables from the garden as children. The sq. ft. garden seems to have answered our needs: 1) it is small and self contained 2) if built with aesthetics in mind it can be placed in your front yard without corrupting your curb appeal entirely 3) there seems to be a small community of people working to improve the art that we can learn from.
I do want to mention that sq. ft. gardening will also appeal to geeks and other analytical folks as it’s all based on an orderly grid of plants, with each grid only containing that which it can support. I guess it’s sort of the Matrix of gardens.
In my next post I will discuss the building of our sq. ft. garden complete with pictures of the build process. So far this project has been extremely fun; my daughter has gotten her hands dirty and to the chagrin of her mom and I has learned the phrase “Cow Poop” (the soil we crated used composted cow manure, and not remembering that she is currently learning words in a rapid fashion we told her the compost contained “Cow Poop”). Live and learn.
Our finished garden: TwitPic