For this project you will need ...

Let's talk for a moment about materials for the garden. The bywords for all of us these days should be Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I have tried to employ those principles at every step of the way with the Thirty Square Foot Garden. Materials to frame your raised bed garden should be relatively easy to scrounge. I was able to put together enough lumber to make the Thirty Square Foot Garden by looking around my neighbourhood. 10" x 2" planks are ideal. These will actually measure about 9¼" x 1½". You might try asking at a local construction site for any scrap wood that is just going to be discarded. Keep in mind that your garden doesn't have to be 6' by 5' like mine is. The inventor of the Square Foot Gardening method (which I talked about in a previous post) maintains that the ideal raised bed size is 4' x 4'. For corner posts, you will want some 2" x 2" material about 5' to 6' long, with pointy ends so that they can be driven firmly into the ground.

This single most important material for your garden is going to be the soil that you use to grow plants in. Everything about your soil will have an impact on the success or failure of your garden, so don't scrimp here. If you are starting from scratch, it is best that you go to your garden centre and buy the best materials that you can. I have come to favour a mix of black earth, compost or manure, and peat moss in pretty much a one third of each mix. If you have a dense, clay-like soil you may want to add some sand to this mix to improve the growing conditions.

Whatever soil mix you are starting out with, you will probably need to improve it over time, and there are many ways to do this. As a starting point it would be a good idea to get a simple soil testing kit so that you can determine what sort of soil you are dealing with. I found a soil testing kit for about four dollars that tests the soil for pH, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash. Following the kit's instructions, I discovered that my soil had a neutral pH of 7, very little nitrogen, a high phosphorous content, and a medium potash level.

Using the results I obtained from the soil tests I know that all I really need to do to improve my soil's growing ability is to raise the nitrogen level. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. If I wasn't fussy about being organic, I could just apply an appropriate fertilizer such as ammonium nitrate. Studies have shown that there is no difference in the nutritional value of organically or inorganically grown food. If you are concerned about having unnecessary chemicals in your food though, you are going to want to use organic gardening methods.

In my case, this would mean adding more compost or using a "green manure" technique. That is what I plan to do. Come autumn, after the garden has finished growing, I will clear it out and plant winter rye seed. This crop will grow on, and come Spring, I will till it into the soil and add more compost at that time. That will go a long way towards improving the nitrogen level of my soil.

Incidentally, have you ever wondered what those three sets of numbers mean on a container of fertilizer?  Like 10 - 10 - 10, or 20 - 10 - 15. Those numbers indicate the relative proportions of nitrogen - phosphorous - potash contained within that particular fertilizer. So, given the example of my soil, I would want to choose a fertilizer with a high first number for the nitrogen, and lower numbers for the phosphorous and potash. Something like a 30 - 5 - 10 would be appropriate for my circumstance, if I chose to have an inorganic garden.

Since I know that I want to grow peas, which are a climbing plant, I added some plastic mesh stretched between the two back posts of the garden. Also, because I am planning on growing pole beans, I put in some tall bamboo poles in the back corners of the garden. To make it easy to use square foot gardening techniques, I used some twine to mark off one foot squares. So those are the materials that I used for the Thirty Square Foot Garden. And when I put all of the components together, here is what the garden looked like: