HOW and WHY GROW HEALTHY “FAST FOOD” … right out of your easy to care for Square Foot Garden

By Wayne Burleson 

Most people shy away from vegetable gardening.  Why?  No time, they are way too busy, besides look at all the modern convinces of prepared food you can buy on the way home from work.  More so, certain individuals have those flash-back memories of all the hard work, bent over with a hoe, fighting weeds, digging and tilling in hard soils, expensive water bills and walking in the mud and harvesting all those over-grown zucchini you can’t even give away. 

What if you could grow over 100 pounds of different kinds of high quality food, incredibly fast, in a very small 4’ X 4’ space in only a few inches of soil?   Square Foot Gardening means no digging, no tilling, and no fertilizer, less water, few weeds and less work.  Would you do it?   The expectation for this article is to break these old row gardening paradigms and to motivate you to grow a plot or a pot.  Then you can say, “This is so simple, I can do that!” 

We proved it to ourselves with an 8 pound cabbage in one square foot area in only 5.5 inches of soil.  Then to top that off, after harvesting this one cabbage, we left the bottom leaves connected to the roots and out of the same 12” by 12” square, we grew another 4 smaller cabbages.  That’s a lot of food produced in one square foot, we were amazed. To make the point that there are much faster and easier ways to grow food, think about all that wasted space between the rows.   That’s the space where weeds, those non-food plants love to grow.  Just think of the increased production if all those non-food plants could become something edible.

Square Food Gardening is a less energy-intensive food production method because the homemade mix of blended compost is the best know soils to grow quality food.   There is no mud, no compaction, these soils hold water longer and remain soft and fluffy.  You save on water, as one cup of sun warmed water per 12 inch square which is 90% less water than sprinkling row gardens.

No land you say, the fact is, if you can grow it in a garden you can also grow it in a box or bucket.

These searches for new ways to grow healthy food faster, all started while on a volunteer Farmer to Farmer Program to South Africa.  Our desire to help the Africans has propelled us into this new passion.  In our home, we have plants growing everywhere, in pots, in plots, in buckets, in portable wintertime greenhouses.  My wife says she is afraid to leave the house, as she might come home and find veggies growing in the toilet or bath tub.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The row garden on the left has been overcome with fall weeds.  In contrast, the Square Foot Garden on the right has almost no weeds.  Most of the crops were fall harvested and this is what remains.  Square Food Gardening is a huge labor saver.  Guess which one of these gardens will be easiest to plant next spring? 

Note the grid system on the right identifies individual squares which gives your garden structure and adds order to your plantings.  This makes it so easy and simple to replant after you harvest one crop.  Square Foot Gardening reduces the space required by 80% over row gardens allowing you to fully use all your ground.  In other words, you are now growing food in the same space that once grew weeds.  More important by eliminating the hard job of weeding, you have just put fun back into gardening.

Grand kids learning how to eat right ... Smiles from homegrown "Fast Food"

 Another very important reason to step back in time and plant your own homegrown “Fast Food” garden is today’s kids are becoming disconnected from the land.  They don’t really know where their food comes from.  Sad but true.  Perhaps another worthy purpose of an All New Square Foot Garden is to teach children, how to plant, grow, harvest, cook and eat right … right out of a garden and show them how simple, fast, fun and easy it is.

The challenge behind all this new gardening effort is to get you thinking about planting a plot or a pot.  Stay tuned for the follow-up articles that gives you step by step instructions – how to make the best gardening soil - free, detailed construction of a 4’ by 4’ square foot garden, and how to plant and care for a homegrown healthy “Fast Food” garden. 

For more information:  Mel Bartholomew, a retired civil engineer and the inventor of Square Foot Gardening method has written a revolutionary best seller book: “ALL NEW SQUARE FOOT GARDENING”   

Check it out.  It's a great resource.  Web site www.squarefootgardening.com