The best-laid plan ...

Given that my garden turned out to be Thirty Square Feet, based on the materials that I had at hand, it seemed like a good idea to draw out a plan for the growing space that was available. Out came the graph paper and I decided to draw the garden on a scale of 1" = 1'. I knew that I wanted to grow a wide variety of things, but I had no idea about how best to do that.

The traditional way of gardening is to plant things in rows, and in fact for about ten years I have had a small row garden in my backyard. It only measured 2½' x 22', but over the years I have had some success with certain crops. In particular, cherry tomatoes. There was one year where we had a steady supply of tasty cherry tomatoes for weeks and weeks.  There was the year where the garden also produced about a dozen cucumbers. But I was never really able to produce a succession of vegetables such that I could say that we ate out of the garden during the summer.

I have read various articles about gardening in small, non-traditional spaces and so I decided to Google the phrase "square foot gardening". The best resource that I found is an updated book published in 2006 entitled All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. Square Foot Gardening is described as the practice of planning small but intensively planted gardens. It turns out that square foot gardening is very popular and you will find many resources available to you on the Internet.

There are many advantages to this method of gardening, but there are two advantages that I really like and will share with you. First, you can locate a square foot garden in a relatively small space. This means that you can put your garden close to you so that you will walk by it every day. You will pay more attention to such a garden, and chances are it will receive better care. The second advantage is that your garden will only take up 20% of the space of a traditional garden. This means that you will use 80% less water and fertilizer, which is a tremendous advantage over traditional growing methods.

So, having read the All New Square Foot Gardening book, I decide to adapt some of those methods to my thirty square foot space. With that in mind, I considered the kinds of vegetables that I would like to grow and which ones might best be successful for my garden, and worked out the following plan:

As you can see, I am planning to get at least fourteen different crops out of my small space. In fact, using succession planting, after the radish, spinach, and lettuce crops have finished, I should be able to plant some other crops to maximize the garden's yield. Gardeners are by nature optimistic and ever hopeful. I must confess though that I will be thrilled if this garden does half as well as I am planning!

The growing season ...

The length and timing of the local growing season is of keen interest to the home gardener.  You want to start growing things at the earliest possible moment, and grow things for as long as you can to maximize your harvest. A good starting place is to consult an almanac for your area. The almanac that I have found most useful over the years is The Old Farmer's Almanac. Besides the Frosts and Growing Seasons chart, this almanac has much other useful information about home gardening.

Consulting the Frosts and Growing Seasons chart, I discover that the growing season for my location begins on May 24th and ends on September 27th, for a growing season that is 125 days long. Of course, the earnest gardener will want to push that envelope as much as possible, both at the start of the season by sprouting seeds indoors and using cold frames, and at the end of the season by using frost covers and prayer.

Since temperature is the key here, a useful tool for the gardener is some sort of minimum - maximum thermometer that allows you to see just how cold the nights are and just how warm it is during the days. There are many designs of these, and I purchased an inexpensive electronic one that has a remote wireless sensor which is located in the garden and a display that I have located conveniently indoors. I kept track of the daily variations and made a graph of the beginning of this growing season. Here is what it looks like:

What the graph shows is that Spring came early this year by about 16 days. The last time the low temperature fell to 0°C was on May 8th. This means an extra two weeks of gardening this year. Wooo! As is usual with these things though, there is of course, a downside. The biggest lesson that we have learned from the ecologists is that everything in our living world is interconnected . Having the first frost free date come two weeks early has implications that we might not understand at all.

As an example, suppose there is a species of bird that migrates north and nests early in the Spring. This species times the hatching of its young to the outbreak of a specific insect, insuring that there will be plenty of food for its nestlings. Now, imagine what happens when the insect hatches out two weeks early. There will not be enough food for our nestlings and the population of that particular bird species will fall this year. Naturalists are noticing more and more of these sort of interactions every day now.

There are unknown millions of these interactions in the world around us. This is why global warming should be of tremendous concern for all of us. A similar interaction with serious implications for us humans could come out of left field at any time and take us by surprise. Think again, for a moment, of the surprise the parent birds got when they discovered that there was no food to feed their hatchlings.

In the beginning ...

Like many things in my life, this all began with my friend, Annabel. Last Spring, Annabel asked me if I would help her set up a small garden. Because the ground next to her house was very poor for a garden, we decided to make a small raised bed. This was located on the very open, south facing side of her house, which insured maximum sunlight for most of the day. Using some boards that were at hand, we managed to construct a bed that was about six feet by three feet and about ten inches deep.

Next, we went to a friend in the country who runs an organic sprouts operation. We got enough organic soil, peat moss, and horse manure to fill the space we had made. This amounted to about four hundred pounds of material. We spread a thick layer of newspaper in the bottom of the bed (we found the Times&Transcript to be extremely useful for this purpose), and then filled the bed and thoroughly mixed the components of our soil.

At a local plant nursery we bought tomato, cucumber, and pepper transplants. We also got seeds for swiss chard, beets, carrots, and parsley. I planted these out with the taller growing plants in the back of the garden. A handful of bone meal was put in with each transplant. We used tomato cages for supporting the tomato and the cucumber plants. Annabel got a watering can and the garden was off and growing.

As things turned out, the garden did really well! The soil in the raised bed was heated nicely by the sun, and the south facing location was ideal for growing things. Even though the garden didn't receive meticulous care, most everything grew very well and there was a pretty reasonable harvest in the end. Based on our experience, I have become quite keen on raised bed gardening. So ...

This year I decided that I was going to try a raised bed garden of my own. At the end of last year's gardening season, we disassemble the components of Annabel's garden and stored them in my backyard for the winter. I scrounged around for some additional lumber and managed to construct a raised bed that measures six feet by five feet.

Instead of using newspaper this time, we turned the sod within the enclosed space with a spade and then put in the soil from the original raised bed. I borrowed a friend's small rototiller and tilled this thoroughly. At my local garden centre I purchased equal amounts of organic soil, sheep manure, and peat moss. This amounted to an additional four hundred pounds of material, which was thoroughly tilled into the raised bed. And that is how the Thirty Square Foot Garden began.

This blog is the story of that backyard garden and my attempt to encourage growing food at home. For many reasons local food production is much preferred to depending on the supply chain to bring us vegetables from thousands of kilometers away. I hope to explore many of the issues that face the home gardener who wants to grow at least some of their own produce, both for the well being of our planet and also for the joy of gardening.