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Square Foot Gardening and a Rain Barrel - A match made in heaven?
4 July 2007This year we have decided to do things a bit differently.
We received the book “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew. The basis of SFG is as follows:
“Square Foot Gardening is a uniquely simplified method of gardening that produces 100% of the harvest in only 20% of the space — AND — without all the hard work and drudgery of single row gardening.”
NO WEEDING!
NO TILLING!
NO DIGGING!
NO PESTICIDES!
NO CHEMICALS!
At First we were a bit skeptical, if this method of gardening is so great then how come everybody isn’t doing it? We figured it was worth a shot.
I am not going to go into the detail of building the garden, this topic is much better explained by the author of the book itself on his website www.squarefootgardening.com
All I can say is WOW! Initially it took a bit of work to build the “containers” and mix the special soil (compost, peat moss and vermiculite) but after only about a month of growing we have monster plants that are twice the size of those that we have seen in the gardens around the neighborhood. Any yes no weeding or pesticides!
We firmly believe that we are holding another ace up our sleeves. We only use the water from our rain barrels to water the plants. It has been rather dry during the growing season this year. If we didn’t have our barrels we would have needed to use the hose quite a bit. We have managed to drain 3 barrels each week on the SFG alone.
The plants are loving the water and “fingers crossed” we should have a bumper crop of tomatoes, watermelons, peppers, carrot, radishes, onions and more very soon.
In the beginning
After planting
Now
