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