Gardening | 8 tips for Square Foot Gardening
Short season growing due to high altitude is ROUGH, my friends. The neighbors warned me when we moved in that it’s quick and hard work and that crops can disappear at the drop of a hail storm.
“I hold off as long as I feel like I can before I really start losing harvest time and then plant.”
I grow what I can from starters inside of the house and others who do better outdoors, I choose to buy plants from the store and transplant them. Even when I wait…. I didn’t wait long enough. WHAT?! I planted 3 plants from Whole Foods on May 31st and guess what, the tips frosted on two of them pretty bad. One was unsalvageable and I’m busy nurturing/praying over the tomatoes.
I’ve liked buying tomato plants more than starting them in the house and transplanting them from seed. I feel like I’ve had a more bountiful harvesting season when I’ve done that. Lowe’s, a local nursery or Whole Foods are all good options for buying starters. I buy organic when available and sometimes skip if I feel fervently about that specific produce being organic.
Today I mapped out garden bed 1, again.
I marked off 1 foot marks for the length of the garden bed as well as 11” at the width since the dirt doesn’t quite spread a full 4 feet. I put the tiniest little nails at each mark and wrapped string around them to build a grid, with Justin over the weekend.
I downloaded an app on my phone to help me understand which are the best companion plants for what I needed to get in the earth right now.
With Sq. Ft. gardening you’re supposed to plant one breed of plant per box and traditionally you’d do a different species of plant in each square for the entire garden. Because w have several large boxes I am using several squares for the same type of plant.
Priority for me are cucumbers, carrots, zucchini, onion and tomatoes. I filled in the most boxes with those items (both seeds and purchased plants) and put each one next to it’s favorite companion. From there I filled in the extra squares with other plant buddies, which include, rosemary, basil, radish and lettuce which is still growing indoors.
Our soil is nutrient rich and we bought it in bulk to save on the cost!
I installed a trellis for the cucumber plants. They LOVED our garden the first year and I didn’t set them up properly so we didn’t . get to harvest as many as I hope to this year.
I planted marigolds in random spots throughout the grid to help keep away bugs.
As the plants come up this year and I need to thin, I’ll be cutting them instead of plucking out the others as to not upset the other more established root systems.
