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Square Foot Gardening – Space Saver and Convenience

Gardening is a fun hobby, very rewarding, and relaxing.  What other activity can beat that?

I have been gardening for a while now, and this year my daughter started her own veggie/herb garden.

While I work with a rather traditional style of organic gardening, she researched other options, and decided on a square foot gardening style.

Actually, it is quite neat looking, easy to plan and organize, as well as very convenient to tend to (don’t have to bend down so low to weed, or to harvest.

She purchased a kit with all the parts for constructing the actual squares, as well as the placing the planting spacers.

Each patch is  4′ x 4′, with 4 spacers to divide the patch into 9 individual 12×12 squares, to space out the plants.

 

Some plants take the full 12 x 12 square per plant, while other squares are suitable for multiple, smaller plants.

The above squares contain multi-color beans (yellow, purple, green), onions, broccoli, red beets, corn, tomatoes, thyme and oregano.

She also planted multi-color carrots (red, yellow,purple), dill, parsley,basil, red and yellow peppers, squash, zucchini, watermelon, and eggplant.

The watermelon, by now, spilled out of the cube, and is sprawling on the grass, but that’s fine, since these cubes are spaced out conveniently enough to allow for mowing all around them.

The broccoli, squash, zucchini, and beans, have already produced fresh veggies to enjoy for dinner.

If you never had a chance to actually see a broccoli crown forming, right from the very beginning it looks just like the broccoli you see at your supermarket.

It forms in the middle of the broccoli plant, just like cabbage, and is surrounded by huge broccoli leaves.

Once you harvest the main broccoli crown, you do not chop down the rest of the plant, since it continues to grow smaller broccoli crowns from other sections of the plant, to be harvested when ready.

To be honest with you, I never grew broccoli in my garden (cabbage type of plants seem to attract lots of pests), and never actually have seen how this plant forms its broccoli crown.

This gardening project is also fun for my granddaughter to watch the veggies grow from seeds (she was helping her mom with planting, watering, and now with harvesting), into small plants, then into full-grown plants, producing food for their meals.

Children have fun visiting a science center, zoo, museum, aquarium, etc, but it is also an eye opener for them to visit orchards, farms, and other interesting places like that.

Please share your gardening experience, and other fun ways to get your children or grandchildren involved in these, or other interesting projects.

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