Square Foot Gardening

First, I apologize to all zero of my readers for not posting in quite a while.

Today was our extra Memorial day holiday that we get every year. Because I work for a retail/direct marketing company that does the vast majority of its business around Thanksgiving and Christmas, we don't get extra days off around those holidays. They try to make it up to us by giving us extra days off for the summer holidays.

To make a long story short, I had today off. I spent most of the afternoon building new square foot gardens for our new house. While we were living in Utah, Annette heard the inventor of square foot gardening on the radio one day. It intrigued her, and we looked into it. Ever since, we've used it as the basis of our gardening efforts.

The basic principle is to create raised beds that are then divided into 1x1 foot sections. In each section you plant one crop. If it is a closely spaced crop, you plant 9 or 16 plants in a square. For something large like tomatoes, you plant one per square.

The secret is the soil. Instead of using whatever soil you have and trying to make it better, you use 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost and 1/3 vermiculite and plant your plants in that mixture. They grow very well.

Today, I built two beds in addition to the one I built 2 weeks ago. We planted quite a few tomatoes and peppers as well as marigolds, pumpkins, and watermelons. I'm looking forward to the harvest. We will make lots of salsa and spaghetti sauce.