Square Foot Garden:

Vegetables from a Square Foot Garden

by N. Algernon Rogers

You know it. I know it. Green leafy vegetables may not be as mouth watering as a juicy steak, but they sure are good for you. While it's certainly true that it's easy enough to pick up everything you need for a salad at the grocery store, you can turn it up a notch and use vegetables you grow in your own "salad" garden. Once you’ve eaten a salad made with fresh greens, onions, tomatoes, and other veggies you've grown yourself, you’ll never be satisfied with the traditional, non-organic salad bar again.

How to Build a Square Foot Garden

You don’t need half an acre to grow a salad garden. In fact, you don't need much room at all. All you need is a basic understanding of the Square Foot gardening technique first developed and popularized by Mel Bartholomew approximately a decade ago. A square foot garden can comfortably reside just outside your kitchen door, or on your back patio. The important thing is for the garden to have plenty of sunlight and water.

The concept behind square foot gardening is to maximize growing space by subdividing a garden plot into one-foot squares, and replanting each square as soon as you finish harvesting the last plant's crop. This keeps the soil in use, and by paying attention to which crops you grow in each square, you avoid de-nutrifying the soil.

Begin by constructing a 4x4 foot raised bed for your plants. Place it so it gets southern light, which gives it as much sun as possible throughout the day. If you’re gardening directly on the ground, all you’ll need is a 4x4 foot wooden frame, though if you want to give it the raised bed feel, you can decorate with rock walls and other methods of building raised beds.

Fill with high quality soil mix enriched with a high grade nitrogen fertilizer. Or you can use good organic compost, depending on your own beliefs in gardening. I personally compost, which I find to be both less expensive and also healthier.

If you choose to start your plants from seed directly in the bed, plant immediately after your last frost. Unfortunately, this really isn't feasible in northern states as the growing season will be far too short. For you northerners start plants indoors about four to six weeks before the last frost is expected, and move outside after the last frost.

Divide the bed into one-foot squares, giving you a grand total of sixteen squares. Each unit can support one of the following:

• 1 tomato plant
• 4 lettuce plants (plant several varieties)
• 4 herb plants
• 4 marigold plants
• 4 nasturtium plants
• 2 cucumber plants
• 16 carrot plants
• 6 onion sets
• 6 garlic sets
• 6 chive sets
• 4 mini cabbages (excellent for coleslaw)

Remember to plant tomatoes and other taller plants toward the back of the bed, with shorter plants planted progressively toward the front. Water well throughout the germination/growing period.

You can begin harvesting lettuce and greens as soon as they have eight or ten leaves. Pick just enough for a salad, always leaving at least three leaves on the plant for them to regenerate. By harvesting leaves instead of entire heads, you’ll get to eat the greens far sooner, and extend their growing season for weeks.

Harvest tomatoes and cucumbers as they ripen. Be careful not to let them go to seed too early, and this will extend the growing season.

Marigolds and nasturtiums are both delicious in salads, but their main purpose in the garden is to keep your plants pest free. They'll keep doing their jobs as long as you harvest the flower heads frequently once they start opening. This keeps the plants blooming.

As plants go to seed, clean out their square and replant with a different variety of the same plant to cycle the nutrients within the soil. Add nitrogen-rich compost when you replant. And that's basically it; your salad garden should need little care other than regular watering and harvesting.

And please do harvest often: the more you harvest, the more the plants will produce, and you'll get the most bang for your buck, as they say.