Square Foot Gardening 101

For beginners, start small with one or two 4x4 gardens, as a four by four can produce a lot of food. Make sure wherever you decide to put your garden bed, it's no more than two feet away from where you can walk on a path, so you can easily reach in to weed and harvest.

Consider starting with a garden plan, thinking about companion planting, and considering the watering needs as well as when different things will harvest. You can be spontaneous, but having a plan helps track when you planted things and provides a history to learn from for the next year.

You can either build or buy square foot garden boxes. There are options like wood or vinyl, and there are pros and cons to either building them yourself or purchasing them. For detailed comparisons, there is an extensive post on the topic available on the My Square Foot Garden blog.

Underneath a square foot garden box is weed mat to prevent weeds, and inside the box is a soil mix called Mel's mix, which consists of peat moss, vermiculite, and compost without any dirt from the ground.

You can start seeds indoors and then transplant them outside, but as a beginner, it's recommended to use store-bought transplants. Before planting outside, you need to harden off the plants over a week by gradually introducing them to outdoor conditions. Use the spacing recommended by Square Foot Gardening to determine how many plants per square foot.

The goal is to plant what you and your family will eat. You can also plan to grow enough to preserve for the year, such as making salsa or tomato sauce from your garden's produce. Recipes for homemade salsa and tomato sauce, as well as other food preservation methods, can be found on the My Square Foot Garden blog.

A trellis is helpful for supporting plants like peas, tomatoes, and cucumbers as they grow upwards, which makes them easier to harvest. A trellis can be purchased or built, and it's better to have one that's not against a fence to make harvesting easier.