Thinking Inside The Box

Imagine gardening that’s accessible to all. Amateur gardeners, the elderly, the disabled, the apartment dweller, even little children can master gardening with ease using this method.  All it takes is a little thinking outside the box – ironic as all the gardening gets done in a box – in the ‘Square Foot Garden’ box.

As everyone knows the economy is a little under the weather at the moment and more and more people are turning to their gardens, their little out door spaces, their patios, their decks, even their apartment balconies hoping to throw a few seeds down and save a some money by growing their own food. I am no exception, but as an extremely amateur gardener, and a bit of a perfectionist, I wanted to find a way that was easy, produced great results, and was pretty much guaranteed to work. 

Enter – ‘The ALL NEW Square Foot Gardening – Grow More in Less Space’ book, by Mel Bartholomew. A book purchased while in the United States, but easily available here, along with its companion cooking guide. This updated version of a 25-year-old million copy best-seller, has been brought to new life with more photos, new features and a brand new look.  The process has been made even simpler and easier to implement, so it says.

Mel Bartholomew is a man with a mission. A mission to tell the world of gardeners just how much easier they could be making their lives. An engineer by trade and a gardener on the side, he spent years using traditional methods of gardening and being extremely dissatisfied with them. So, upon retirement, he decided to do something about it. He applied engineering principles to the concept of gardening and developed the ‘Square Foot Garden’ method.

The principles behind this are firstly to make everything as simple as possible. He has studied traditional gardening methods and found them to be lacking. He believes that gardeners should use raised bed boxes for ALL their growing needs, and he has the research to back it up.  For instance, a Square Foot Garden needs only 20% of the space a traditional garden uses. He has eliminated the need for pH soil tests, double-digging, and never ending soil improvements.

According to Mel, the greatest comfortable reach of the human arm is 2’, so using his design for the bed boxes one is never more then a 2’ stretch from any part of the box. Thus the largest boxes tend to be 4’ x 4’. Generally the boxes tend to be a 6” depth maximum, although deeper versions can be built for leek and root vegetable growing purposes.

A special mix, which is made up from compost (5 different types are used, each with its own reason for being included), vermiculite and peat moss, is used. It’s a mix he’s branded ‘Mel’s Mix’. ‘Mel’s Mix’ uses equal amounts of the above ingredients, and this leads to a mix that will feed your plants top rate nutrition, drains well and has none of the nasties that soil might have. The mix was measured by volume, mixed on a plastic sheet beside the bed box and shoveled in, watering lightly at the half full stage, and again when completed.

Due to the nature of the mix, weeds are not really a problem. Any weeds that occurred were air borne and were easy to pull up, using one’s fingers. No more hours spent on hands and knees, hoeing plots of land – back breaking labour at the best of times. Planting is easy due to the looseness of the mix, one simply uses a trowel to make a depression as deep as necessary, insert the seedling or plant and replace the soil. Harvesting is just as simple. Using a trowel to help excavate, simply pull up the plants and place a little compost in the empty space, to renew the mix. When everything has been harvested the mix can be ‘turned over’ if wanted but is generally unnecessary with the addition of the compost.

This method appealed to our ‘make it as easy as possible’ nature, as well as the fact there was actually no space for a designated area to put down a vegetable patch. So we built our beds in a somewhat deluxe version, as we wanted them to look attractive as well as fulfilling a need. Finished properly with timber posts, cappings and painted white these look ornamental in the garden, and were placed on the existing lawn. Usually the beds are placed directly on the ground, over some cardboard or landscape cloth, however we gave the boxes a plywood base then raised them off the ground on a timber plinth, to protect the lawn, but actually they have become a permanent feature. In fact we are likely to add more, rather than take any away.

Mel, however, is a proponent of doing things as cheaply as possible if necessary and recommends ways to get your materials for free, including diving in skips, and going by construction sites looking for spare pieces of timber.

The beds are, in their most basic form, four pieces of timber, of a 4’ length, fixed together using decking screws. Placed on a piece of landscape cloth or cardboard to discourage weeds or grass growing up they are then filled with ‘Mel’s Mix’. Having been built the beds are subdivided into the ‘square feet’ by use of simple timbers laid at right angles to each other. Mel gives a directive of what can be fitted into each square foot. 16 leeks per square foot for example, or 4 cabbages. This is a very handy guide, as we tended to under plant the areas, and realized quickly we can get a lot more from our boxes. 

Gardening has never been easier since we started using the Square Foot Garden Method. Having been, to be honest, somewhat disinterested gardeners before, we have morphed into extremely keen amateurs, astounded by the amount of courgettes, leeks, beetroots and potatoes produced during the summer, all of which tasted better then anything we had ever bought, fresh, frozen or canned. The surplus, and there is a wealth, has been sold at a local farmers market.

Our extended family, having seen the results we have got, have been requesting their own bed boxes. Each person seems to have a different need and as a result we have seen the variety of ways the bed boxes can be used. For the apartment dweller, a longer, narrower box to fit inside his balcony was created. For the elderly grand-aunt a box raised 900mm above the ground on legs, with a handy shelf underneath for storing the tools. Extra wide ledges for kneeling on are another way to make it accessible and easy to use. The boxes can be painted any colour or stained with timber stain. The possibilities are endless.

Suffice to say, this amateur is a fully converted gardener. The results I have got, with the amount of work I have had to put in, are phenomenal. I have no hesitations in recommending this method of gardening to anyone – it really is as easy as they say.