All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated: MORE Projects - NEW Solutions - GROW Vegetables Anywhere (Volume 9) (All New Square Foot Gardening, 9)

Planning Your Square Foot Garden

As you get ready to be a Square Foot Gardener, there are two important planning stages you need to complete. First, you need to decide which vegetables to plant, and how many of them. This will help you figure out how many squares you need and how many boxes are necessary to accommodate them. This first part of the planning process is the subject of this chapter.

The second planning stage is to decide what shape your Square Foot Garden boxes need to be, and where they should be positioned within your yard. The second half of the planning process will be covered in Chapter 4, “Laying Out Your Square Foot Garden.”

Building Boxes and Grids

As outdoor building projects go, building Square Foot Gardens and accessorizing them is about as easy as it gets. The classic Square Foot Garden is essentially just a shallow raised bed made from ordinary 1 × 6 or 2 × 6 lumber, available at any big-box home center, lumberyard or even your local hardware store. The ends are joined together with deck screws—these are called butt joints—and the box is then positioned on a sheet of landscape fabric in the yard. Into the box goes a filling of Mel’s Mix growing medium, and then narrow slats or lath are laid across the top of the box to form a grid of 1-foot-wide squares, which will guide your planting process. If you want, you can accessorize your Square Foot Garden with trellises, fences, or covers, but this isn’t always necessary.

A Year of Square Foot Gardening Produce

On the following page, you’ll see all the produce you can grow in one Square Foot Garden in a moderate climate with a regular growing season. If you live in the South, you might get even more food than this.

This Square Foot Gardening setup is a standard 4 × 4 box. The back side is mounted with a classic conduit-and-net

trellis. It was planted with maximum diversity in mind, with one different type of vegetable in each grid.

Some of these vegetables bore fruit only one time, while others were constant producers, and a couple of the squares

were replanted for second harvest at midseason.