Square Foot Gardening

After recent trips to the grocery store I've decided to look more seriously at gardening at home. After much research into what I thought gardening was like and with experiences as a child I didn't really like the prospects of tilling up the ground, planting long rows of seeds, weeding them every day, watering them for hours on end, and having a huge harvest at once where half the stuff goes bad before you can use it or having to can stuff you'd never eat.

So after much more research I stumbled across a book by Mel Bartholomew called Square Foot Gardening. You basically make a raised garden that's 4x4 and six inches tall and fill it with a mixture of peat, compost, and vermiculite, since it's not very much it won't be expensive to do either. One 4x4 garden with little tending, almost no weeding, and a cup of water per plant per day should yield veggies for a family member. So for my family it would take four 4x4 squares. If you have a ravenous family you can bump it up to a 4x8, 4x12, or a 4x16 I guess. The idea that it's four foot across is to harvest your crops without stepping on the soil and packing it down. It needs to be loose and able to hold and drain water.

There is a planting guide on how many seeds to plant per square foot because you'll be breaking down your garden square with a grid laid over the top. Corn for example is four seeds per square foot and you'll have to add a stabilizer because they'll be quite tall.

You can stagger planting your crops so your harvest isn't all at the same time and your garden will produce daily if you wish. It takes some practice and note taking to figure that and it's more than an amateur such as myself would attempt to start with.

Materials for four gardens will likely run less than fifty dollars, the mixture of soil probably close to the same. Not having to pay high prices for vegetables at the store will be priceless though:)

Make no mistake, as oil prices continue to go up food prices will follow. Inflation is imminent, just like watching a bad storm on the radar as it creeps closer to your home. It's coming and it'll be bad. We owe too much money, spend too much money, and haven't the political will to change it right now as a country.

Trucking companies will go broke with these high prices, less food will make it to market, and demand will exceed supply eventually. Growing your own food is the cure for that and it makes all of those events irrelevant to your dinner table.

The Date says we can easily do this and it'd be a great family project for us. I agree and really I don't see much of an option in the coming few rough years.