Planting in our Square Foot Garden

It's gardening time! I've been anxious to get the garden started with all this warm weather. I looked at the 10 day forecast to make sure we weren't in danger for frost-like temperatures. It has to be above 38 degrees technically for no frost. We gathered all our supplies and were ready to start. You use Mel's Mix (he is the guy that wrote the book on square foot gardening). It is 1/3 compost, (it is good to have a variety of diff. composts, which i didn't read until recently, oops) 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite. You can find everything, but the vermiculite at a home depot type store. We went to a local nursery and got better prices for everything. I think we spent around $45 for all the mixture. There is a bag of potting soil that was in the garage that accidentally made it into the picture, but you don't use any real soil/dirt, just the above mentioned items.

I also did a lot of research on how many seed holes to plant in one of your squares. There are simple conversions, but I found the best website to learn about all these. Go here and start reading away. She has an easy chart that has the common vegetables to plant. I also researched what would grow well next to each other and what things to keep far away. I downloaded these sheets from $5dollardinners. You can also keep track of your anticipated harvest dates.

Here is the drawing of my garden layout! You can also see the dots that indicate the holes that you drop 2-3 seeds in each one. It all depends on how big the plant/vegetable will grow and spread out.

It's time to mix! We just put 1/3 of each in and just mixed together with our hands (with gloves) and kept adding and adding.

An important feature of the square foot garden is that you can grow 16 things in one garden. To easily separate it out David made me wood dividers we put in. So it will be easy to keep track of what is where. I think it turned out so great!

After doing a lot more reading I am getting nervous about how this is all going to turn out. For the best results you are suppose to start your plants inside and transplant them so I already have that working against me. If none of this turns out, just promise you won't make fun of me. I could really be doing all this for nothing or it could be amazing! I have high hopes so cross your green thumbs for me! I'll keep you posted in a few weeks  when things start sprouting.