One of my favorite things to grow in the square foot garden

Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce.  All kinds of lettuce-like 12 different varieties.  Imagine being able to go out in your square foot garden-where you have 4 heads in each square-snipping a little of this variety, a little of that variety, a little bit of spinach, and maybe some cuttings of Swiss chard.  Even more, you can vary the look of your garden by choosing different colors.  Not just green, and not just red, but those that are both colors all in one.  You can buy rainbow lights-a variety of Swiss chard that comes up in 4 different colors.  It would be virtually impossible to have the same tasting salad every night with this kind of variety.  Of course, the trick is to have your lettuce around when those tomatoes are ready.  That’s a little bit of a trick, but we will talk about that in another post.  We are huge fans of Caesar’s salad so we grow quite a bit of romaine-in different varieties.  You can get a feel for how packed in these plants are in this picture.  It’s not over planted, but there is no wasted space in a square foot garden.  And because of that, it’s difficult for weeds to find a place to land and grow.  There are two ways of harvesting in the SFG system.  One-pull the whole head of lettuce when it’s ready.  Two-cut the outer leaves of this one, that one, etc.  When you do it this way they will continue to grow back.  There will come a time when their worn out, and that’s when you pull the whole thing and toss it into the compost unit.  We just pulled 16 heads of lettuce last night.  That will last us a while.[ois skin=”below post”]

2 thoughts on “One of my favorite things to grow in the square foot garden

  1. Trevor Rumsey

    My chard plants seemed to have died in the last couple of days. Any ideas what would have caused that? I water daily.

    Reply
    1. Jim Post author

      Trevor..hmmm..are these from seed? How big did they get before this happened? Was it from critters? How is the rest of the garden doing, in particular, those squares adjacent to the chard? Do you have any pictures? Did you notice this happening over the course of time or did it happen overnight?

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *