Square Foot Gardening: For Beginners by Evelyn Craig

Author:Evelyn Craig [Craig, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crafts; Hobbies & Home, Gardening & Landscape Design, By Technique, Container Gardening, Vegetables, One Hour (33-43 Pages), Gardening & Horticulture, Techniques
Amazon: B00L759GRA
Published: 2014-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: When, What and How to Plant?

Planting is the most exciting part of gardening. Growing a plant from seed is a very rewarding experience. Picking your harvest and using them in your kitchen will make you feel proud of your hard work.

What to plant

The usual process of backyard gardening is to plant as much as you can in a seedbed and transfer the ones that grow to the ground. Just like the other aspects of traditional gardening, this process is inefficient. The competition of growth between seeds in a seedbed will affect their initial growth. Many of the seeds will be overwhelmed by the other seeds.

Square-foot gardening promotes efficiency even in the use of seeds. The seeds that you don’t plant today can be used in the future. To make sure that none of your seeds go to waste, you should set your gardening goals. Start by identifying the types of vegetables or root crops that you usually use. These are the most useful plants for you and these are the types that you should plant first.

You should also think of what you are going to do with your harvest. Are you going to sell them or are you going to use them at home?

If you have a way of selling them, then you can plant one type of crop in your gardening box. If you plan on using all your produce at home, then you should plant a variety of vegetables that you usually use in your kitchen.

When you become an experienced square-foot gardener, you can begin experimenting with vegetables and root crops that you haven’t tried yet.

How much to plant

After deciding on the vegetables, root crops, or flowering plants that you want, you should visualize how they will fit in your gardening box. You should classify these plants according to their sizes. Vegetables like cabbages and broccoli are large types. Only one plant of these types will fit in each small square in your gardening box. Lettuces on the other hand, are medium sized vegetables and you can fit up to four of them in one square foot.

Smaller vegetables like bush beans and spinach are small and you will be able to fit nine vegetables of this size in one square foot. You will be able to fit sixteen of the smallest types of root crops like carrots, radishes and onions. Imagine the size of the root crops and vegetables that you want to plant and decide on the number of plants you will plant in each square foot based on their size.

Your gridlines will guide you in positioning your vegetables. You can even plant multiple types of vegetables in your gardening box. Varying the types of crops will prevent overplanting of one type of vegetable. You should also try to plan the crop rotation that you will use each year. Changing the types of plants in your garden regularly will control the population of specific pests in your garden. Pests tend to like specific types of plants.

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