Square Foot Gardening

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http://gardening.ygoy.com/2007/08/10/square-foot-gardening/

A retired American engineer called Mel Bartholomew came up with the idea of Square Gardening. He believed that the conventional home gardening is too time consuming and requires a bit too much effort. With Square Foot Gardening, you can grow the same quality of vegetables at home with comparatively lesser effort, space and time.
Basics of Square Foot Gardening

• Pick an area that gets about 6-8 hours of sunlight everyday.
• Divide your garden into beds that are easily accessible from all sides.
• These beds should further be divided into units.
• Each unit is about 4’x4’.
• Build boxes to hold the soil above the ground.
• Each square unit should be about 3’ apart from the other so that there can be walking aisles around each square.
• Soil should consist of 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost and 1/3 coarse vermiculite.
• Select a different herb crop, a vegetable and a different flower in each square foot. You can plant about 9-12 plants per square foot.
• Plant about 2-3 conserved seeds per hole.
• For transplants, make a small saucer shaped depression.
• Do not water by your hose-pipe, you might end up over-watering. Water your plants adequately by hand from a bucket of sun-warmed water.
• Harvest your plants when they grow up.
• After harvesting your square foot add compost and replant it with a new different crop.

Caution

• Do not walk on your square foots.
• Always tend to your plants from the aisles that surround your square foot on either sides.
• Make sure your square foot garden gets ample sunlight.

Benefits of Square Foot Gardening

• Though Square Foot Gardening is a new method, the simplicity of its concept makes it easier to understand and apply.
• Square Foot Gardening is very user friendly and doesn’t require any specialists. Its great for beginners.
• You can locate square foot gardens anywhere close to your house as long as you have ample sunlight.
• Square Foot Gardening is also very economical and reduces all the costs down to five times.
• Even though Square Foot Gardening uses half the space used in conventional gardening, yet it is equally efficient.
• Square Foot Gardens are easy to protect because of their small size and proximity.
• Square Foot Gardens are very environment friendly because the allow recycling and reuse of resources.
• Square Foot Gardens have five-fold  harvest, which means they are highly productive.

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