Author Archives: Jim

About Jim

I'm a certified square foot gardening instructor that enjoys teaching others how to grow their own great, healthy, organic food. I also enjoy cooking, biking, playing my guitar, reading, and card magic.

We have a winner

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Congratulations goes out to our friend John who knew the right answer.  You had to know the spacing of the SFG system to get it right though.  We had lots of participants and some pretty good answers-some things that I’ve never even thought of or heard before!  I’ll have some more ninja-type contests in the future to keep things fun and interesting.  Looking for a great tasting lettuce?  Here’s one for you.  It’s called Barbados which I bought from Johnny’s.  It’s got great flavor and it’s got a lot of “crunch.”  Sometimes the loose leaf lettuce gets a little soft so you need to spice it up with some crunchy textured greens.  Even though it’s beginning to approach the hottest time of year you should still be planting and growing lettuce. You’ll have to cover it and water it a little more, but the result is certainly worth it.  So far this year I think I’ve harvested over 100 heads of lettuce.  The trick is keeping it going for the next 8 weeks when everything in the garden starts to produce.  For more on how to protect from the heat see some of the previous posts I’ve put up.  The other trick is how to properly store lettuce.  How many times have you harvested lettuce from your garden only to have it last in the refrigerator for a couple of days before it turns brown and mushy?  Now, that’s discouraging.  All that work and you don’t even get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.  There are some tricks to this and if you’re interested in learning how to do it, you really ought to consider my ebook.  Besides addressing the 2 most common problems that get in the way of a successful square foot garden, you’ll learn all kinds of tips and tricks.  There’s things in there like homemade remedies for pests, a few great recipes using garden items, composting, etc.  It’s 60+ pages long and it’s a great deal.  And by the way, I wanted to say a huge thank you for all those who have purchased the ebook.  It’s been a fun endeavor and it’s spurred me into writing another one which I’ll be working on this fall.[ois skin=”below post”]

Win a Wealthy Earth ebook

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You can win a free copy of my ebook if you can identify the ninja secret in one of these squares.  The only dis-qualifier is if you’ve attended one of my workshops where we’ve discussed this, along with many other “ninja” secrets of the square foot garden.  You will have to know the system to find it though.  The first one who gets it right will receive my ebook.  I will provide the answer as soon as a winner is named.  It’s a tricky one!  By the way, if you haven’t read my ebook, I think you’re missing out.  You can read more about it on this site, or you can read the review by the inventor of the square foot garden-Mel Bartholomew himself.  You can read it here.  There’s all kinds of nifty things in it that will augment your skills in the SFG system.  It’s also great for instructors because these are the questions you’re going to hear when you’re teaching.  Right now in my garden, I’m making sure there are fewer and fewer empty squares.  You have to time things out a little bit.  Making sure you have lettuce when all those tomatoes are ripe is a trick in itself.  Anybody can grow lettuce in the spring when it’s cool, but it’s more difficult in the hotter weather.  It takes more work, but you’ll be glad you did.  I had a friend of mine who recently told me that  their lettuce grew very well last year, but it ended up tasting bitter.  When I asked a few more question, I think the answer to her dilemma was that she needed to cover her lettuce.  After your seeds have sprouted and then begin to grow, the best thing you can do is to shade your lettuce.  If you don’t it will continue to grow and you may even have a nicely formed head of lettuce-of whatever variety.  But the sun will beat down on that and ruin the taste.  By covering your lettuce, you’ll have some of the tastiest salad greens around.  If you’ve planted spinach in the spring, it’s time to replant those squares with something else.  Carrots, beets, onions, herbs, bush beans, or flowers, etc.  Be sure to amend your newly planted square with several trowels full of compost and your ready to go.  If you’re thinking of flowers, keep nice looking ones in mind that can also be used in salads.  The first flower that comes to mind for that is nasturtium.  Maybe you want a scented flower?  You decide what you like but I’ve got nicotiana and angels trumpet in mine.  The smell of those two are fantastic later in the summer.  You’ll have to buy transplants at this stage though-unless you’re in a climate where you have a much longer season than we have here in the mountain west.[ois skin=”below post”]

A chance to earn big money from your square foot garden!

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Here’s your chance to make 50, 100, 200 or even $300 dollars for your SFG’s.  The rules are simple and at this time. And right now is the perfect time to start your gardens.  You still have plenty of time to plan, take pictures, and then to send in your SFG pictures at the end of the summer.  You can read about it here.  This is a great opportunity for your children to learn about gardening and to even make some money doing it!  When I first read the rules, I mistakenly  thought  the only way to win was to have your SFG in the front yard, which my be prohibited in some area.  But there are other places that you can enter to win-namely, a family garden in the backyard.  Give it a read.  Here’s a picture of my 1X4′ box.  Tonight I will harvest the back row of lettuce.  The reason?  First, it’s time.  Second, if you look closely you’ll be able to see squash plants that are beginning to grow.  If I kept the lettuce in for too much longer, it would end up shading the squash, which  you don’t want to do.  So far, this 1X4′ box has produced: a variety of early crocus and what will be 16 heads of lettuce.  Following that it will then start producing butternut squash all summer.  In the fall, I will replant this box with 8 more heads of lettuce-while the squash is still growing/maturing.  Twenty-four heads of lettuce and a large amount of butternut squash?  See how much that would have saved you at the grocery shop.  That would save you at least $60 in lettuce, and at least another $10 in butternut squash.  Roughly speaking, you’re going to save around $75 from an area that is 4 square feet.  You should be able to save $15-20 per square foot of your garden, and maybe more depending on what you grow.  With things like cherry tomatoes, herbs, and specialty crops you’ll save even more.  What if one of your kids wanted to make some extra money in the summer?  If they had their own 4X4′ box, they could almost effortlessly make at least $250.  What if they had 4-4X4′ boxes?  Given the time they will put into it, that’s pretty good money for the little guys/gals.[ois skin=”below post”]

How to protect your corn from wind in a square foot garden

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Today we’ve had wind gusts up to 30 MPH.  By tonight that might be as high as 50+ MPH.  One year my corn had gotten to be about 4 or 5 feet tall when one of these wind storms rolled through our neighborhood.  I returned home from work to find that all my corn was flattened.  It was laying on the ground completely destroyed.  All that hard work for nothing.  It was a real bummer!  At that time the corn was looking great-strong, healthy, etc.  I vowed to never let that happen again and came up with a way to do it.  Even though these aren’t as big as the ones blown over many years ago, some of them are big enough to still get pulled out of the ground because of corns shallow roots.  This shows you how to protect your corn in strong winds.  I’ve simply taken some posts(left over from an earlier experiment that didn’t work out-never throw anything away)and place one in each of the 4 corners.  I then put an additional post on the outside-middle.  Then I just stretched some left over nylon netting over the posts until tight.  The wind will still blow the corn, but it can’t blow it over.  As the corn grows higher, I will put another horizontal piece of nylon netting about 3 1/2 feet from the ground.  That way, I have a good, strong anchor to keep all the corn in place no matter how hard the wind may blow.  There have been times when we’ve had winds in excess of 70 MPH.  When I grew corn during one of those years, it came through the wind storm with no damage at all.  I went on to harvest 70+ ears of corn out of this little 4X4′ square foot garden box.[ois skin=”below post”]

 

Two of four cartons of lettuce

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One of the main missions of the Square Foot Gardening Foundation is to eliminate world hunger.  I don’t believe we will ever get there for a variety of reasons.  While driving to work last week I heard of a nearby city putting flags in the ground for “homelessness awareness.”  I wasn’t sure what that would do to help the homeless.  It’s become a sensitive subject for me for personal reasons.  This picture shows 2 of the 4 banana cartons that I was able to fill up with 64 heads of lettuce and 1-1/2 pounds of spinach.  I don’t mention this for any accolades at all-none.  It’s nothing to brag about and that’s not why I did it.  It was a desire of mine to show what a simple little plot of land-in this case a 4X4′ square foot garden box-could produce without much effort.  And it was done very cheaply.  The seeds were maybe 4 or 5 years old and I used very little-2 or 3 seeds per hole.  I think the packet were somewhere around $2 each.  The only real cost was watering, and since I started this in early spring, I was able to let Mother Nature do the majority of the early watering.  After that I hand watered, and if you’ve been following this blog,  you’ll know how much less water a square foot garden takes than a single row garden.  When it was time to harvest, I simply filled my trusty blue Rubbermaid tub(I have these all over the garden for little things like this), snipped the lettuce, gave it a quick rinse, drained them, then placed them in the boxes.  I don’t know how many families it was able to feed but I’m sure it was a fair amount.  My whole point was to show how easy it would be to truly make an impact on feeding the homeless.  This was so easy to do and it cost very little.  Fresh, totally organic, and delicious salad greens!  How can you help?  Would you consider taking a small area of your garden and dedicating that portion to grow food to make a donation to the local Food Bank?  This was just one box!  What if you had 3 or 4 boxes?  Or what if you had a single 4X8′ box?  That would give you 128 heads of lettuce in just 32 square feet! They sure were appreciative too-which is not the reason to do it.  While others are sticking flags in the ground(which would have cost a whole lot more money than this did)you could actually be growing food to feed the hungry.  Give it some thought.  It really was simple.[ois skin=”below post”]