Wednesday, June 17, 2009

I decided to do it = a SFG garden!


I admit, I haven’t done a REAL blog post in awhile. So I made myself sit down and post…with PICTURES even. So, here is one of the MANY and seemingly never ending project we have undertaken. Before Tami moved she came over and helped me build my first Square Foot Garden.

I have been literally SO excited to do a square foot garden ever since I read “The All New Square foot Gardening Book” which our garden group in the ward I moved away from were discussing. After reading the book I was so convinced that it was the WAY to go – no tilling, no weeding, big yield in small spaces, growing vertically, no bugs, rotation all built into it…SO I gave it a GO.

I felt like an Amazon women as I drilled into the 2 X 6 wood frames with deck screws (doesn’t take much does it?!) I put the frames on top of my grass, nailed on the weed cloth, and filled it with compost, vermiculite, perlite and peat moss. And then I spray painted electrical conduit and put that over rebar to create the vertical frames. Here it is:

My first grids I did were made of aluminum blinds and fell apart right away. So I bit the bullet and made wooden grids - I am really glad I did! Much more sturdy.


I will say, compared to previous gardening I have done I have been bored because there is literally almost nothing to do after the initial assembling and planting. Just some major pruning to the tomatoes to make them grow up the netting, and some tying of the zucchini plants to stakes to make them grow up netting.

I also made a garbage can compost bin to which I drilled about 120 holes. I put newspaper and kitchen scraps and roll the garbage can once a day (I am sure my neighbors think I am crazy) and whallah! I have compost in 5 weeks. Do I sound like a total gardening nerd?

Has anyone else tried this? Have you heard about it? What are your experiences with it?

7 comments:

Rebekah said...

Those look amazing! I'd like to give some gardening a try now that we are buying a home and this method looks really easy. I may not get to it til next year. The first year will be spent identifying all the plants in my new yard.

Cheryl Anne said...

Amazing. Thats the only word that comes to mind. My garden is full of weeds, but the plants are still growing too. :)

Cami said...

Looks great! I am a total failure at gardening, but this looks great. Looking forward to seeing how it goes.

kelsey said...

Bonnie, you are amazing! Did you really build those grids all by yourself!? What an awesome garden.... and compost... I'm impressed. I hope in our next home we have more room for a garden, i'll have to try your method, it looks so neat!

Palomita said...

I square foot garden, along with doing traditional gardening, too (because we have a whole acre, and space is NOT an issue! - we still built trellises for all of the climbing things, too). I LOVE square foot gardening!!! It really does make life so much easier, and honestly, I've turned a lot of the care of it over to the kids, because it's so easier to do. I'm so happy for you, and so impressed that you were able to do it all yourself (Ben built ours). You ARE an amazon woman!

Adam Stewart said...

Bonnie - go SFG! We've done it for years and love it. It is really easy now that we hooked up a drip system to it. Just put the seed in the ground and come back in a few months. I love it! Looks like you will soon be harvesting massive amounts of veggies. I can tell it was a BIG project.

Kimber said...

I'm impressed, Bonnie! I'm going to give that a try when we have our own yard someday. So how is everything growing now that it's August? On another note, you've got a cute family...good to have you in our ward!