Square foot Gardening

[Melei'sMom]

Anyone ever heard of this? I found it on a blog I follow and then located the book at the library. the website http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

We are moving into our new home soon and have a teeny tiny yard and thought this might be a way to get the most out of our limited space and still leave some play room for Melei.

[growler~GateKeeper]

You could also try Vertical gardening

[MyBirdIsEvil]

This isn't really verticle gardening per se, but you could do an elevated rock garden. Put like kind of a rocky hill at the corner of your yard and put plants all over it. It saves on room but you can put creeping plants and stuff and have a really lush planted spot.
Expanding on that idea, how about a step garden? Lay out boxes in kind of a step pattern. That would be kinda like a combination of the square foot gardening thing and the vertical gardening.

[CearaQC]

Square foot gardening will only give you tons of produce if you intensively and successively plant. This means you need a plan and when one crop is finished you rip out the rest of the plant (don't forget to compost it!) and put something else in it's place. So unless all you want is baby lettuce and one or two tomato plants, you need to have room inside your house to start seeds and always have stuff ready to put out in your square foot. You will need as much sun as you can get so set up for a south facing planting area.

If you go for peas and beans, it's not really worth the trouble in my opinion to go for the bush types. Even though you may not have much ground space, you always have vertical room. So pack in those pole beans and peas. You'll get way more veg in a smaller space that way. Plus, there's no bending over to pick your supper.

I have videos that show just how much produce can come out of these types of plots, which is a lot. I will cut those parts out of longer videos and share.

True vertical gardening is great but you need the space to lay it down flat to allow the plants to root in before it goes vertical. And you need a drip system that slowly feeds in weak plant food and water. This system is very popular in Europe but hasn't made its way to N America yet. Paris, France covers entire skyscrapers with vertical gardens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63D2UkkTtBQ

[Melei'sMom]

Thanks for those! lots to look at while I figure out how to do my gardens.
Too late in the season this year to start anything outside, so I got all winter to decide what I will be doing.

[CearaQC]

Yes but you can set up your area and get it ready for planting in the spring!

I'm still working on those videos. My computer takes FOREVER but it's coming along. And I had to jar some homemade dill pickles this afternoon and make bread. Three, 6 minute video excerpts showing the square foot gardening are posted on the net, just got to get the other 3 going.

[Tundra_Queen]

I tried this gardening about 18 years ago, but because our gardening season is so short I found it didn't work well for me.

Debbie