Square-Foot Gardening: For, Against and Adaptation

Given that I am limited for space, the square-foot method seemed like the way to go.

The idea is to make a 4ft x 4ft bed (around 120 cms x 120 cms), fill it with a special soil mix, divide it into 16 squares, plant a different crop in each square. It claims some significant advantages:

- It takes up less space than a conventional vegetable bed for the amount you get out of it.
- The planting method results in fewer seeds being used, meaning less wastage.
- Because of the soil mix, the water retention is better, and the theory is that you don't need chemical fertilisers
- No double digging!

Then I started thinking about yields. In each square, you're supposed to plant either 1, 4, 12 or 16 seeds, depending on the conventional spacing instructions on the packet. To me, this seemed like a bit of problem if you want to grow more than one meal's-worth of stuff. (16 parsnips a year, anyone?) Now, you're supposed to be able to simply re-plant in the square where one crop finishes to get a succession of it, but as a novice, I wasn't confident that I would be able to get all the succession planting right, especially with the rotation involved. And I couldn't get my head around how it would work out with slower growing crops, unless I wanted to plant the whole grid with the same thing, but at two to three week intervals between each square... I guess I must be missing something, but I had to plan around my current understanding.

I could, of course, get more of each crop by having more than one 4ft x 4ft square. Problem is, if I built enough squares for a reasonable amount of veg with the recommended work space around each one, we would no longer have a garden - we'd have a farm!

To get the best out of the space available, I had to adapt the method a bit. I planned out one rectangular bed, with a small pathway through it so that I could reach the middle for weeding. My internal grid will contain 2 ft x 2 ft (60cm x 60 cm) squares, rather than 1 ft x 1 ft ones. I will still use the square-foot spacing instructions, as I don't see why they shouldn't work on a larger square (so long as it isn't too much larger). I was working on the basis that I would get the benefit of the same working area as I would have with 3 and a half "conventional" square-foot beds, but without taking up the same amount of garden.

The next adaptation was a matter of environmental concern. The soil mix recommended by Mel Bartholomew is 1/3 peat moss. Peat moss comes from bog. Bog is important, endangered, and in addition, I like bog. Okay, in the winter, it's probably as miserable and grim as everyone thinks it is... but in the summer and up close, it's lush, and springy, and full of beautiful tiny little plants with colours so vivid no camera could catch them properly...

This is bog. In Scotland. Where it belongs. If I want Scotland in my garden, I'll just let the lawn go soggy.

The nearest substitute to peat is cocoa coir, which I couldn't find locally. Looking at what was available, I decided on cocoa shell, which the blah on the bag says will eventually break down and enrich the soil - which is what the peat is there to do in the first place.

All that said, I'm not an angel, and it's very difficult not to buy cheap multi-purpose compost with God-knows-what in it when Sainsbury's are selling it at £2.50 for 50 litres and you're trying to save money. But at least I'm using less of it than I would be if I stuck to the original mix.

I suppose what I've done here is to try and get the best of all possible worlds by thinking about the reasoning behind each bit of the square foot method that caused me a problem and then doing something else which will hopefully achieve the same thing.

However (and I can't emphasise this enough), I don't really know what I'm doing - so don't regard my adaptations as necessarily sensible ones. I'm sure any serious gardeners reading this, particularly of the square-foot variety, will be kakking themselves laughing by now.