Bartholomew - Square foot gardening answer book: tips, techniques & FAQs collected from more than 2 million successful square foot gardeners

First published in 2012 by Cool Springs Press, an imprint of the Quayside Publishing Group, 400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401

2012 Cool Springs Press

Text 2012 Square Foot Gardening Foundation

All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purposes of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the Publisher.

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Digital Edition: 978-1-61058-820-1

Hardcover Edition: 978-1-59186-541-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bartholomew, Mel.

Square foot gardening answer book : new information from the creator of square foot gardeningthe revolutionary method used by 2 million thrilled followers / Mel Bartholomew.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-59186-541-4

1. Square foot gardening. 2. Container gardening. 3. Vegetable gardening. 4. Small gardens. I. Title.

SB453.B3826 2012

635--dc23

2012037772

10 9 8 7 6 5 3 4 2 1

Design: Mandy Kimlinger

Layout: Diana Boger

Illustrations: Melanie Powell

Cover photo Marcus Harpur

Photos on by Paul Markert

NEW INFORMATION FROM THE CREATOR OF
SQUARE FOOT GARDENING THE REVOLUTIONARY
METHOD USED BY 2 MILLION THRILLED FOLLOWERS

Mel Bartholomew

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

This book is dedicated to all of our wonderful Square Foot Gardening fans who might need some slight clarification on some of the finer points of SFG. There may even be some that didnt quite finish reading the book and want to jump right into some of the answers. This book will give them just the sort of details theyre looking for.

Id also like to thank all of our Certified Instructors who helped set up this book with suggested questions that they received and who also had helpful hints on how detailed to make the answers. Happy Gardening to all those who read this book.

Mel

I invented Square Foot Gardening back in 1976, and Ive been spreading the word ever since. Ive received letters from readers and gardeners all over the world, and Ive taught more people about Square Foot Gardening than I can count. I figure that at one time or another, Ive heard just about every question a person can ask about this revolutionary method of gardening.

When I sat down to write the ALL NEW Square Foot Gardening in 2007, I looked to answer the questions that I had encountered since my first book, Square Foot Gardening, was published in 1981. I developed Square Foot Gardening as a simple alternative to wasteful, labor-intensive and inefficient row gardening. The refinements in this new edition from Cool Springs Press made the method even simpler and more straightforward than ever.

But people still come up with questions, so I wrote this book to share the answers to those questions with everyone, and to help gardeners everywhere get the most out of their gardens: whether or not they are true Square Foot Gardens.

Questions never bother me; I think theyre a healthy part of any process. In fact, quite a while ago now it was a question that started me thinking about gardening in a brand new way. That question was Why? In 1975, I formed a community garden as a retirement project and saw firsthand how wasteful, time-consuming, and laborious row gardening can be. Despite everyones best intentions, and a large initial group of enthusiastic community gardeners, by the end of the season our community garden was an overgrown mess, and many of the gardeners had burned out and simply given up.

Im an engineer by trade, so I love to solve problems. As I thought about what had gone wrong, I realized that the whole system of row gardening just didnt make sense to me. So I asked that most important question: Why? Why plant a whole packet of seeds all in a row, only to then spend a lot of time and effort thinning out the seedlings to 2, 4 or 6 inches apart? Why constantly weed all those 3-foot aisles? Why till and improve and fertilize all that garden area every single year only to pack it back down as you walk around working in your garden? And the most important one: Why garden in rows spaced 3 feet apart anyway? The answer I got in every case was, Because thats the way weve always done it.

As you can imagine, that answer wasnt good enough for an inquisitive engineer like me. Thats when I invented Square Foot Gardening. It worked like a dream in 1976, when I instituted it in our community garden. It worked so well, in fact, that it got a lot of attention from local news outlets and the general gardening community. Pretty soon, more and more people wanted to know about this newfangled way of growing vegetables and flowers. For every person I taught about SFG, there were 10 more who wanted to learn. I knew the method could revolutionize gardening, and would save gardeners a lot of time, effort, tools, space and water. And I knew it would work for gardeners across the countryregardless of where they lived or what the local climate was. At a point, it only made sense for me to write a book to reach all those people. So I did, and the original Square Foot Gardening was published in 1981.

Your method is awesome. My 3-year-old and I have a blast with our two 4 6 boxes48 crops and loving every minute.

Rich from North Carolina

That only fed the fire. PBS caught wind of what I was doing and asked if they could come by and film short segments about SFG, calling them A Minute in Mels Kitchen. Those segments grew into a full-blown show that had a five-year run on PBS on every channel in the system, and then eventually, three more years on the Discovery Network and The Learning Channel.

When the show came to an end, I figured Id go back into retirement and enjoy my own quiet little garden. Well, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men! When the Utah Board of Education came knocking, hoping to institute SFG in schools as a way to teach children, I just couldnt resist. I set up the Square Foot Gardening Foundation and came up with a curriculum and a program we called A Square Yard in the School Yard. The program took off and we eventually installed Square Foot Gardens in schools across the country.

The SFG Foundation kept me pretty busy, especially once we connected with the Utah State Board of Education and agreed to put an SFG in every grammar school in the state! That was quite a challenge, but it was also rewarding to see children everywhere learning through SFG. Little did I realize that it would be just the start of the Foundations work.