A new garden

I'm not a bad gardener. Really. It's just that I've had to deal with not enough sun (I like my trees), marginal soils (sand underlain by clay), not enough time (working mom), etc... But it was time to ramp up my efforts. Take it to the next level.

Last year my husband, Wendell, bought me Mel Bartholomew's book "Square Foot Gardening". At first, I kind of dismissed it as being a nice idea, but probably not something I would do. But after thinking about it, it seemed to combine a lot of my philosophies about gardening: lots of variety in a small area, minimal upkeep, organic methods. So I thought we should give it a try.

The method involves building a raised bed using a mix of peat moss, compost and coarse vermiculite. No native soils -- start from scratch. So we went down to our local recycled building supply store and found some fantastic 4x6 tongue and groove cedar framing members. We bought enough to construct two 4'x4' planter beds that share one common wall. The idea behind the 4'x4' bed is so that all parts of the garden can be reached without walking on, and therefore compacting, the soil. So the two beds, although they are connected, are staggered so that all areas are reachable from the sides.

Finding the peat moss was easy -- any garden supply store sells it. Coarse vermiculite was supplied by my son's girlfriend, Crystal, who works at a garden supply store in Gainesville. I searched high and low for a local source for compost. I compost all of our vegetable scraps from the kitchen and much of our leaf litter from the yard, but I had no where near the 9 cubic feet of compost needed for this project. But the smallest amount of compost that I could buy from a local source was 1 cubic yard. So I ended up buying the bags of Black Kow compost that are sold at Home Depot. It's not certified organic, but it is good quality and all that I could find in our area.

Each 4'x4' box is divided into 16 squares, each to be planted with a different crop. Depending on the size of the plant, each square will be planted with 1, 4, 9, or 16 seeds. Broccoli, for instance will have only one plant per square, but onions can be planted up to 16 per square. Our 12" squares are delineated with screw-eyes threaded with nylon string.

The pavers around the perimeter are so that we can mow around the boxes. We still need to build a support on the north end for the climbing bean plants. Maybe next week.

Materials list for boxes:

• 4"x6" Cedar framing members: ~70 LF
• Angle braces: 16
• Screw eyes: 24
• Nylon string
• Newspaper underneath the boxes for weed suppression
  
• An inch or so of sand to hold the newspapers down (~2.5cf)

Materials list for fill

• Coarse vermiculite: 2 bags (~3.5 cf ea.)
• Black Kow composted manure: 8 - 50 lb bags (~1 cf ea.)
  
• Peat moss: 4 - 2 cf bags
• Homemade compost: ~2 cf

Materials list for border

• sand: ~8 bags
• 16"x16" pavers: 24
• 4"x8" pavers: 28

I have not added up the total cost of this project. Some of the materials we had just lying around, like most of the paver blocks. Whatever the final cost, it will take many, many gardens to break even economically. But that's not really the point of gardening, is it?