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Re: newbie

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

At 07:16 PM 1/1/00 -0600, Barbara, from Minnesota, wrote that she is about 
to begin gardening for the first time this spring and is starting with 
Mel's book.

>My mother-in-law bought me....guess.....yep!
>Square Foot Gardening. She never gardened either,
>so she asked a friend, who recommended this book and
>this method.  I've been reading it slowly and am getting
>very excited. It seems so sensible. And starting with a small
>4 by 4 block seems like a nice gentle way to get started.

You are wise to begin small.  As your confidence grows, you can take on 
larger plots.  And remember, sometimes Nature takes all your successes away 
with bad weather or other things happen that make it impossible to have a 
good gardening year.  This past summer ('99) was just such a year for me in 
regard to tomatoes, my fave crop.

We had two bouts of 100+-degree weather in the mid-Atlantic area very early 
in the summer, once in June and then again around July 4.  This went on for 
days, doing significant vascular damage to the aboveground tissues of all 
plants, and tomatoes in particular.  I actually had toms that appeared to 
make it through the hot periods but never set fruit or even put out a 
single blossom!

Square-foot gardening is mainly about vegetable production, so pick only 
veggies you really love to begin with.  As your studies will reveal, some 
vegetables are so much better home grown that they are always worth the 
trouble.  Tomatoes are one of those.  Peppers are good for the home 
gardener, too, because the colored ones never get very cheap at the 
supermarket anymore, so you can save real money growing your own.

Although carrots are good subjects for square-footing, I haven't found the 
flavor of my homegrown carrots any better than ones from the grocery.  So 
that's a plant I don't bother with at home anymore.

Some square-footers on this list swear by growing their own corn.  But many 
popular eating corns produce just 1 ear per stalk, and that's not a very 
high return for the amount of space corn takes up.

Nevertheless, I may try corn in '00 because the "Seeds of Distinction" 
catalog, which came today, lists 'Chires Baby Corn.'  It produces the 
little oriental ears seen in Chinese cookery.  The real attraction is its 
productivity:  Chires makes 4- to 5-foot-tall plants that can yield up to 
40 ears each because it "often has 3-5 stalks with 8-12 ears per stalk," 
according to the catalog.  Furthermore, "Mature ears can be dried and 
shelled and used as a popcorn."

Now *that's* a corn worth trying in a SqFt configuration!

>Do those of you who use this method, do you also garden or
>landscape in other ways or do you do everything in blocks?

I have raised beds done SqFt style but regular organically shaped 
flowerbeds in my front-yard lawn that are just normal.  I do tend to plant 
fairly much closer than the catalogs recommend for those, too, though, 
because I like big blocks of solid color for display purposes.

For the record, I don't plant my tomatoes at SqFt spacing because our 
climate is humid and hot and we have lots of fungal problems here.  I 
prefer to keep my toms spaced farther apart to encourage airflow and help 
keep the plants drier above the ground.

--Janet
[just outside Washington, DC, USDA zone 7]


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