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.

What should you be doing in your SFG now?…

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That’s an easy one-planting! It’s the 3rd week of March and your soil should be loose, prepped from last fall and now ready to plant. Give it a quick turn with your trowel-one of only 3 tools you will need in the SFG system. Right now you should be planting all the cool weather crops. Things such as lettuce, swiss chard, radishes and spinach should be directly planted in the soil. There’s no need to start these items from seed indoors. If you’ve done it right and taken care of your soil you should have things coming up in 7-10 days. That’s if your weather is mild. If you are able to cover and protect your gardens, then you should still have things coming up in 7-10 days. That’s just how it is with us SFGers. Here you can see that I have thinned out my square so that it now holds 16 radishes. Now I just water, sit back and watch it grow. They’ll be ready in about 3 weeks. Just in time for my lettuce and spinach to be ready. When that happens I shouldn’t have to buy any produce or veggies from the store for at least 6, maybe even 7 months. How would you like to save that kind of money? Anybody can do it…join us at the several free lectures in town and then learn all of it at the workshops….

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New spring spinach

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This is a look at my newest spring spinach.  It’s about 2 weeks old right now and it’s looking good.  In the SFG fashion you will plant 9 seeds per square.  And that’s exactly what you’ll see in this square.  I’m trying to make a better effort this year at spreading things out a little longer than I usually have in the past.  I think I’m a lot like most of you-when it’s time to start planting you just want to plant everything all at once.  That’s the old single row garden mentality.  One of the keys to square foot gardening is to pace yourself.  If you plant 8 squares of lettuce at once and they all come up, what are you going to do with 32 heads of lettuce?  Now I’ll start to plant just a couple of squares at a time and separate my plantings by about 5 days.  Once again this is Space-our favorite variety from Johnny’s select seeds.  It’s very easy to grow, comes up quickly, and tastes good.  I also bought a new variety from Johnny’s this year that I’ve never tried before.  It’s call Tyee and it’s a variety of spinach that you can grow in the summer.  This will probably take the place of our New Zealand spinach which we normally grow in the summertime.  That’s OK by me-I think New Zealand is hard to grow and doesn’t taste that great.  It’s also not even a member of the spinach family but of the mustard family.  As I looked around the garden today I noticed that my sugar snaps have just started to break ground.  We’ve had some snow and cold weather so I’ve been covering up my beds.  Maybe I should have left the sugar snaps uncovered as they do well in cold.  But I’m sure it will all turn out well in the end.  None of the neighbors are able to start any gardens yet because their soil is too wet.  I will be planted for about a month before they get to theirs.  By the way-if you look very closely at this picture you can see a lady bug in the lower left hand section of the square(around 7 o’clock)….things are starting to look good…

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Starting seeds in vermiculite….

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I was reading on the SFGF official forum earlier today.  There was a post from someone who was disappointed when they tried to start their seeds early in vermiculite.  The comment was that only 50% of them actually came up.  Well, this is precisely why you want to start in vermiculite.  If you would have started those seeds in flats (or worse yet in the garden) and nothing came up you would’ve felt like you wasted a lot of time-and money.  And maybe even some of those plants that came up in the vermiculite to begin with wouldn’t have come up at all in the garden because of the weather.  But if you would have started them in vermiculite you end up only planting seeds that you know are good-because they have been sprouted in vermiculite.  This is a great trick to do when you have saved seeds from years past.  Over time these seeds lose more and more germination so you don’t really know which seeds are good and which aren’t.  By using vermiculite you only find out which are the good ones.  I’ve highlighted how to do this by pictures in the gallery.  This kind of information is what my “members only” page will consist of.  It’s going to show a lot of “how-to” and a lot of little tips and tricks of a successful square foot garden.  It’s not ready to go yet, but it will be shortly.  Hopefully….

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My square foot garden in early March…

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Many years ago when I was doing an internship with Mel he said to me: “what if you have a vegetable garden that is protected from wind, rain, snow and other bad weather?  All of a sudden, you have a different garden!”  And that’s the truth.  Today it’s been warm-about 60-but it’s been very windy.  I have now planted 2 complete boxes in the 2X16′ garden(16 squares.)  First, if I had a traditional garden I wouldn’t be able to plant yet.  The ground would still be frozen solid.  But then even if it were ready to go it would dry out quickly because of the windy conditions.  Because I cover my garden with plastic-making sure it’s vented so as to not get too hot-I can create an ideal growing environment for the items I’ve planted.  As others are attempting to get their gardens ready and getting out those tillers-do you notice the soil after their done?  It’s all in clumps!  That’s because the ground is not ready to be rototilled yet-it’s too early for those gardens.  Not so for the SFGer.  While your friendly neighbors are out there tilling away, we now have possible rain and snow in the forecast for this weekend.  That’s an easy thing for all SFGer to handle, but it’s not such an easy thing for a traditional row gardener.  So far I have now planted 8 squares of a variety of lettuce, 5 squares of spinach, 1 square of radishes, 1 square of carrots, and 1 square of walla-walla onions…..

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Look at this square foot garden….

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While I was looking for a new camera card at Costco today I came across this little nifty item. When you read that Mel Bartholomew is the father of raised beds this is proof. This unit is composed of 2-4X4′ boxes that have been placed on top of each other for display purposes. It’s made out of some kind of plastic or vinyl and as it shows comes with a slick cover to protect your gardens for early/late gardening. The price? It’s $99. So for this you end up getting 2 boxes. That’s a fantastic deal! It’s made by a company called Lifetime. You know the return policy of Costco-it’s great. Although these are not like the white ones you can buy through the SFG foundation, this does give you a great and very affordable option. I actually like the colors. If I had room in my backyard I would buy them. On the personal garden front, today I planted 4 more squares of lettuce(2 Romaine and 2 Red Cross)along with 4 squares(36 plants) of space spinach. I say plants but they are started from seed. When they grow it will be 36 plants. The soil took me about 5 minutes to turn over with my trowel-1 of only the 3 tools you will need in a square foot garden. It was watered in and then covered. I have some great things that are going to be presented in the “members only” section portion of my site. I have had a lot of questions lately about how I cover my gardens without using the “wagon-cover” method. While I am certain these work fine, they do take a lot of extra work on your part. I will be detailing and showing-with pictures-the method that I use with my gardens. It’s very simple and fairly inexpensive. In time I have discovered an even better way to cover your gardens that’s every bit as effective, but costs even less money….more to come later

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