All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated

MORE Projects - NEW Solutions - GROW Vegetables Anywhere

Mel Bartholomew

• Publisher: Cool Springs Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780760362891
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Gartenbau

This updated third edition of the best-selling gardening book in North America continues to inspire with planting charts, growing tips, and the know-how you need to grow more veggies than ever before.

Since Square Foot Gardening was first introduced by Mel Bartholomew in 1981, this revolutionary way to grow vegetables has helped millions of home gardeners enjoy their own organic, fresh produce in less space and with less work than traditional row gardens.

New and experienced gardeners will love the charts, photos, illustrations, and how-to tips in All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition —including 42 veggie-specific planting, growing, and harvesting guides —that make growing your own food fun, easy, and productive.

Perfect for experienced gardeners or beginners, you'll learn the three simple steps to Square Foot Gardening: build a box; fill it with Mel's Mix™; add a grid. No digging, no tilling, no fertilizing, no guesswork—less watering, waste, and weeding! There's so much more packed in this 272-page instructional book —boost your organic vegetable harvest with inspiring how-tos such as:

• Adding trellises and archways to grow up and maximize your space
• Installing automatic watering systems
• Growing vegetables in dense urban areas with little or no yard
• Feeding your veggies the organic way with Mel's Mix™
• Teaching STEM to kids with Square Foot Gardening—perfect for little hands
• Protecting your plants with shade and frost covers
• Managing pests in the garden with natural methods

Join the millions of gardeners around the world who grow their own organic, fresh produce with Square Foot Gardening, and make next season your best veggie harvest ever.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Mel Bartholomew began developing his method of gardening relatively late in life, after he retired in the mid-1970s from his first career as an engineer. It was born to some degree out of Mel’s pointed disagreement with the most traditional gardening methods that didn’t make practical sense to him. There’s irony to the fact that this man who made growing “in a box” so famous developed his methods by thinking entirely “outside the box” when it came to rebelling against conventional wisdom. It is perhaps this attitude of the stubborn revolutionary that makes the Square Foot Gardening method so very popular to this day.

A Square Foot Garden is not only efficient but a treat for the eyes.

When Mel began gardening in about 1975, it was simply a hobby for a newly retired fellow to pursue, a chance to get out in the fresh air and mingle with other hobbyists. At that time, of course, vegetable gardening was a rather utilitarian activity in which large rectangular plots of ground were churned up, fertilized, planted in long rows spaced about 3 feet apart, and regularly watered. And weeded. And weeded. And weeded.

Mel’s analytical mind, bolstered by a common-sense attitude, soon picked up on many limitations to traditional gardening methods—reasons why the activity was neither as enjoyable nor as productive as it might be. Among the questions he asked:

• Why do gardeners grow in rows spaced 3 feet apart? That space is nothing more than room for weeds to grow.
• Why do gardeners always grow more food than they can possibly eat? Almost every gardener wastes food by growing too much.
• Why do vegetable gardeners plant such long rows? It takes up too much space.
• Why do they fertilize so much? It is costly and inefficient.
• Why is it necessary to weed constantly? All that work spoils the fun.

Over the next few years, Mel systematically found solutions to all these problems and more. And as his method was perfected, more and more people wanted to learn how he did it. Mel soon was in full swing in his second career as a community activist, lecturer, and author, promoting efficient and enjoyable methods of vegetable gardening.

The insights Mel developed would revolutionize gardening forever:

Vegetables can be tightly spaced. Vegetables can be planted mere inches apart and still can grow quite productively, and you can get far more produce in a limited space than people realize. A lot of produce can be grown in a very small space. In fact, a single 4 × 4-foot raised bed subdivided into 16 squares using dividers can grow a lot of the produce a normal family needs. Simple succession planting—introducing a new crop when the previous crop is done—allows a single 4 × 4 Square Foot Garden to make a huge dent in your grocery bill.

Weeding is not necessary. The reason weeds grow so rampantly is usually because too much fertilizer is applied—and because it is often dumped on ground that is not even planted with vegetables. Instead of churning up a huge garden bed and tilling in massive amounts of fertilizer that then stimulates weeds, Mel saw that confining vegetables to a 4 × 4 Square Foot Garden filled with controlled growing mix can eliminate most weeds and make it extremely easy and quick to pull them when they do appear.

Garden “dirt” is not a very good medium for growing produce. It contains too many weed seeds and not enough natural nutrients. You can create your own growing medium that is far better for growing vegetables than ordinary garden soil. “Mel’s Mix” was born out of experimentation to find the perfect growing medium.

Traditional gardening methods are wasteful. You can grow better produce in less garden space, planting fewer seeds, using less fertilizer, watering less often, and with almost no weeding necessary. Rather than planting scads of seeds over long rows, then thinning out the seedlings once they started crowding each other, Mel recognized that very careful planting of seeds right from the start could eliminate a great deal of work and could make a single pack of seeds last for several growing seasons.

Similarly, Mel saw that careful application of water where it was needed in a small, carefully planted Square Foot Garden was infinitely more efficient than dumping untold gallons over an enormous vegetable garden covering most of your yard.

ADVANTAGE TO BEGINNERS

Although the so-called experts were slow to embrace the Square Foot ...