AlexH

• Get started earlier!  (my wife giving birth to our son certainly interrupted things)
• Soaker hoses do not work, they are too big, inflexible, and difficult to water evenly unless you buy all the same kind. Maybe a drip irrigation system?
• It is very useful to have a father in law that is an electrician when building trellises.
• I need a dedicated perennial herb box: oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme, savory, mint, chives, etc
• Need to catch crop some radishes, and space them out this time, so I’m not eating radishes morning, noon, and night.
• If putting cardboard down, put them inside the boxes, don’t lay the boxes on top of the cardboard, or the soil will leak out when it’s watered.
• Hammer in the copper tape before filling the boxes, especially when there isn’t much space to swing the hammer.

The weather has been pretty good for the past week, we got some big dumps of rain, then lots of hot weather.  I’m very pleased with the progress of the garden so far.  The beets, radishes, onions and beans are all sprouting.  It looks like the tomato square is getting the most sunshine, as the radish leaves are about 50% than the other two squares.

I’m worried about the seeds that I planted for the carrots and lettuce.  Those were from old seed packets, so I hope they were still viable.

I don’t have trellises up yet, but with the beans sprouting already, I think I’ll have to get going soon!

While Tracy was having Mothers’ Day tea, I finished the seed planting, and attached the copper tape to the sides of the boxes with roofing nails.  Hopefully the dissimilar metals won’t corrode the tape.  It’s been a while since I’ve taken a chemistry class.
Now the trellises need to be installed, but the even the transplants won’t need them for a few weeks, I hope.  It’s my first time growing cucumbers, so I bought 3 seedlings, and one seed packet.

Wow, it has been a super busy few days with the garden.  So far, I have:

• built 3 - 4×5 boxes
• dug the grass in the backyard
• lined the boxes with cardboard from the recycling depot
• made some Mel’s Mix
• filled the boxes
• watered the boxes with liquid bonemeal and SuperFlow from Raingrow
• laid down the soaker hose
• planted my transplants:
  • tomatoes
  • cucumber
  • marigold
  • lettuce
  • basil
  • parsley
• planted half of the seeds

Tomorrow, the rest of the seeds get planted.

There are a few changes that I would make to the Square Foot Garden if I wanted to make a low maintenance version. Right now I don’t have a plot anywhere, but in the future I want to expand my garden, and that means I’ll probably have to find space in a community garden. I’m also thinking of places like summer cabins where the garden would be planted in the spring and only visited once a month until summer vacation starts, and then you want as much food as possible.
Irrigation: First would be how to deal with watering. Mel recommends you inspect the plants while you water. This isn’t possible for a low maintenance garden, so I have several ideas.

• Buried terra cotta pots: Apparently an ancient form of irrigation, the pots would be buried in the garden, filled with water, and covered with a lid. The water will pass through the breathable clay into the dirt. Note that the bottoms would have to be plugged, and the SFG would need to be made slightly larger to accomodate the pots. They could possibly be buried on the outside edges of the squares, in the walkway, which should still keep the soil in the sqaure moist. A modern variation is using 4L milk jugs, with holes punched in the direction you want the water to go. This might be a good way to use up space in the paths between squares.
• Drip irrigation: I’d like to get some IV drip bags from a hospital
• Wicks: I haven’t seen many people doing this, so maybe it’s not feasible, but I think a good way would be to use some kind of canvas that is in a water container in one end, and buried in the garden in the other. Maybe it would be wrapped in plastic until it gets below the soil so there isn’t too much lost to evaporation.

The other things that Mel recommends are great ideas, for example rain collection.

Pests: The second problem is pests. Slugs are a very common problem around here because of the relatively cool weather. The slug problem would be dealt with two ways: a barrier around the planter, and a barrier on the planter itself. The barrier around the planter would be two things: egg shells and pistachio shells. Apparently the slugs don’t like to crawl over the sharp edges.

If they do make it past, the next barrier would be copper tape. It could easily be mounted on the 2×6’s.

Other methods of slug control aren’t low maintenance enough, for example stale beer, which would either get filled up with slugs or diluted with rainwater.

Now that winter has arrived, I’m starting to think about how I can improve the garden for next year.

Time: One thing was simply the date I got started. I didn’t buy the SFG book until after my first frost date, so I didn’t get things in the ground early enough. Next year, lettuce and other leafy plants will get started in January, so they are ready to go when the danger of frost is gone. I’m just starting to harvest the lettuce now, but I could have moved that date back another month if I was better prepared.

Plants that get direct seeded will be started earlier as well. It means that I will have to pay more attention to the weather and soil temperature, but now that I have the basics figured out, I’m confident that I’ll be able to handle the extra complications next year.
Late planting also has a ripple effect for succession planting. I have a square that is still full of tiny carrots when I was planning on putting beans in soon. That in turn will effect when I can replant it for the fall.

Staggering: I also need to get better at staggered planting. I planted two squares of radishes all at once, when I should have spaced them out with once a week planting a half square at a time. Same goes for the onions

Soil: This year I didn’t have much compost so I think that affected yields. It seemed like the maturity times are much longer that what was written on the seed packets. For example my radishes took about 50 days to harvest, when the package says 30-40.

This morning, the windstorm hit.

I remembered hearing that it would peak at about 4am, and at 3:45am, Tracy woke me up to ask what the noise was outside.  I looked at the clock and listened for a second, until I heard a branch hit the roof.  Right away I knew what it was, so I told her it was the windstorm, and she fell back asleep immediately.

I couldn’t fall back to sleep.  Aargh.  I tossed and turned, thinking about my day, and various other things, until I got up at 5:00.  That gave me some extra time to design a kickass coldframe setup for the Square Foot Garden.  Hopefully I will be able to understand my chicken scratch when I look at it again. :D  It should be pest and deer proof too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about weed control in a square foot garden system, and this coming spring I’m going to try mulching with cardboard which will be useful in the square foot gardening system.

We have a bunch of moving boxes left over that should be able to be cut nicely into 2×4 rectangles.  I’m going to find a punch or hole saw that can cut holes big enough to put a peat seedling in, and also get a root vegetable out.  Using the punch, I’ll put the holes in the cardboard to match whatever I’m planing at the moment.

When the time comes for planting, the soaker hose will be put down first so it is flush with the dirt, then the cardboard placed on top, anchored so it won’t blow away.  It can even be nicely labeled for quick identification while planting and picking.

Two of these will cover a 4×4 square nicely.

When a single square is finished, it could either be cut out, or maybe a small crop of radishes could be planted there until all of the squares in the planter are done.

On August 13th, we got the garden planted at Tracy’s parents’ house.  It’s a bigger plot than I had at the house in Vancouver, so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with it.  It’s a mix of cooler weather crops like lettuce, spinach, and peas.  I also planted beans but that is mostly an experiment.  I don’t expect them to last into the winter since they don’t appreciate the cold weather, and I can’t put them under a coldframe.  They may not even produce anything that I can harvest, but I hope they will fix some nitrogen in the soil.
Once again I make the mistake of planting all of the onions at the same time, so I’m going to have a lot of green onions coming soon.

Many of the beets, arugula, and mustard are ready to harvest now as microgreens.  Interesting that it only takes about 3 weeks.  I did some thinning, but they just went in the compost pile rather than being eaten.

I should note that the carrots, spinach, and lettuce have not progressed as much.  Either old seeds, or incorrect conditions for them.  I thought that the weather conditions would be ideal right now, so I wonder if it is related to the soil.

One concern that I have is slugs.  Copper tape is so expensive, but I think I will be using that once the rain starts for the fall.

I’d estimate that 8 square feet in 4 weeks makes a salad.   4*7*8 = 224 sq ft to eat a salad every day, but it would require replanting the squares every day.  It would be nice though, radish greens, beet greens, arugula, and mustard.  Tough on the wallet though, planting 256 seeds every day.  When I have more space, I’m going to practice collecting seeds, but for now, I don’t have the space or the willpower to let things go to seed, when I could be harvesting them.  Especially for a biennial like beets.

Tracy went by to pick up mail from our old house, and reports that the tomatoes are doing great! They are getting watered and the kids upstairs are having fun picking them.  Makes me feel better after abandoning them in July.