Now it can be told

I’ve got a Square Foot Garden!

“WTF’s that?” I pretend to hear you ask.

This (photo credit Frostcall.com)

To start with, it’s the Seekrit Projekt I’ve been mystifying about these last few days. Yes, a huge anticlimax; I know. I just can’t resist tormenting Sara by tweaking her curiosity.

Basically it’s an intensive, organic, space and resource-efficient form of gardening developed by a guy named Mel Bartholomew. He has a website devoted to SFG, and also a book.

If you’re interested in growing your own food, and especially in the increasingly trendy subject of urban gardening, you really might consider looking into SFG. I checked the book, All New Square Foot Gardening, out of the library and starting reading. Before I’d got halfway I’d ordered it on Amazon. Just to give you an idea of what I thought about it.

The basics are pretty, well, basic. You take four 2 x 6 boards (allegedly you can use 1 x 6s, but I can’t see how you’d screw ‘em together without splitting them), each four feet long. Since boards are usually sold in lengths starting from 8 feet, it’s easy to buy a pair and get them cut in half. Unless you’re me and shopping at the Lowe’s on 12^th Street, but that’s a story too long and off-pissing for me to tell right now, especially as tired as I am. You also need six inch-wide 4-foot laths. Fortunately they tend to come just that length.

You connect the 2 x 6s into a six inch deep box. You then fill it with something called “Mel’s Mix”: equal parts compost, peat moss, and something called vermiculite. The latter’s the “final ingredient” I crowed about obtaining in my last post. It’s not easy to find; I turned it up, pretty cheap, within a mile or two of my house.

The compost is by preference homemade. I had to beg some off my friend Larry since mine was, as mentioned, too damned damp to sift and measure properly. Fortunately he had plenty and was kind enough to share. Peat moss is peat moss, I guess; I bought mine at Lowe’s.

So you stir up 8 cubic feet of these ingredients and pour them in your frame. Then you divide it into sixteen square-foot sections with the laths (hence the name, yes.) And then: plant!

And I finally finished today. Poor Emma Dog did not get her walk; and I didn’t finish transplanting the seedlings I bought Saturday at Plants of the Southwest until after sunset. Kind of had to drive myself to get it done, but some of the plants were getting distinctly droopy.

Naturally it was too dark for my not-so-great cell phone camera to take pictures of. Hence the use of someone else’s as credited above. It’s particularly appropriate since it shows the mesh support for climbing viney plants, such as tomatoes and chile peppers. Which by amazing coincidence I planted.

Also got some seeds at Chase hardware for things I can plant at this relatively late point in the season. They’ll go in over the next few days.

When I let Emma out, having finished the transplanting, she trotted into the yard, saw the new addition 15 or so feet from the kitchen window, and stopped dead. She walked cautiously up to the SFG and sniffed it. Then she came straight back to me, apparently seeking reassurance that this new addition was okay, and not something she was somehow to blame for. Dogs are like that. They do assumed guilt like a human four-year old.

So, yay! I’m pleased to get this done and going. I’ve talked a lot about landscaping and gardening but not accomplished so much. That’s why I wanted this to be a going concern before I revealed what it was.

Will it work? I’ve no idea! That’s why we do things, or so I’m given to understand.

Stay tuned.