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.