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| First garden bed done, 4' X 4' |
The harvest has begun!
In late-May I planned and planted a garden in the backyard of the new house which volunteers from the government-sponsored youth volunteer program Katimavik will be living in for the next 3 months. Within the last 2 weeks a friend and I have begun to harvest a variety of leafy greens planted early-June.
Ever since learning about the
Square Foot Gardening method I've been curious to see how it works.
The purpose of Square Foot Gardening is to maximize the amount of food which can be harvested on a particular plot of land while not jeopardizing the amount of space which each plant needs to grow to its maximum maturity.
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| 4 plugs of leaf lettuce per square foot |
It's a cool method with an efficient approach - rather than viewing an entire plot of land and planting seeds in relation to its size, Square Foot Gardening teaches us to view each square foot of soil as an opportunity to be maximized. As such,
Square Foot Gardening is becoming pretty common in urban agriculture and small-plot agriculture.
To do this I dug beds that are 4' X 4' and sectioned off every square foot with string. From there it's as easy as planting the appropriate number of seeds or plugs per square foot.
Interesting concept. Is there any advantage to the string sectioning off the one foot squares other than for visual separation? It seems it would be tedious task.
ReplyDeleteWhat else are you growing?
Yeah it's not completely necessary. The stringing off is just a way of keeping things accurate, I also used it to visually explain to the Katimavik volunteers how the concept works.
ReplyDeleteOther than the lettuce, there are onions, kale, broccoli, and tomatoes (who loved last weeks heat wave..). I wanted to keep things simple so the volunteers could easily manage it. Last weekend I facilitated a maintenance workshop for them which was sweet. Now it's all in their hands.