Creating a Square Foot Garden
Here in NY the weather has been a bit of an issue for gardening. We finished out May with rain every day and multitudes of flooding in our yard. June has been better so we were able to get going on our garden expansion.
This was a much bigger task than we anticipated. We ended up digging out approximately a 15′ x 15′ area for our garden……by hand! What a task transporting all that grassy, root filled waste into bags, into the back of our vehicle, and then to the local yard waste recycling center!
We chose the Square Foot Gardening Method because it included raised beds (no extra digging down and tilling), because I liked the orderly square method, and because the soil mix called “Mel’s Mix” was supposed to be really great (and it is)!
Digging our Square Foot Garden:
After digging out the space we had to build the 4′ x 8′ boxes and put up the fencing.
While there was work going on outside, there was also work going on inside. Our plants were still growing in our bay window and we created plans for where the things would go in our garden. We used the Gardener’s Supply Company website to layout our garden. Unfortunately do to the over watering the kids did we lost many seedlings. Thus the reason our garden is not full. The other reason it doesn’t appear full in the plans below is because we have some squares filled with cutting flowers and some spaces reserved for the pumpkin seeds to come in the fall!
Here is where we are at now. It is the last day in June, I was just able to get around to planting outside last week, and our plants (if you want to call them that) have a LONG way to go before they will give us any vegetables. I may be calling this seasons garden “a wash” in more than one way!
Zonnah
June 30, 2011 @ 11:49 am
I feel for you guys, digging up sod is hard work but in your instance it paid off!
Ingrid Kron
June 30, 2011 @ 1:16 pm
It certainly was a lot of hard larbor and unfortunately the wet spring did not help to facilitate the process. Even though not as many seedlings survived as you would have desired, Lord willing you will still have some fruits to enjoy from all the time and labor poured into this.
Joe Ciravola
June 30, 2011 @ 2:01 pm
Jayden looks very determined to water the plants in that last photo. 🙂
Tracy Bua Smith
June 30, 2011 @ 2:58 pm
Your garden looks beautiful as you put so much time and work into it! Best wishes for successful harvest one day! Thank you for linking up to NOBH!
The Homeschool Garden - The Curriculum Choice
April 5, 2018 @ 12:00 pm
[…] and harvesting, gardening teaches so many valuable skills. It took lots of math to plan out our Square Foot Garden, including things like measure the wood for the boxes, figuring out how many squares we wanted and […]