Here it is the last week of November and Im still doing things out in the garden.  I will have a nice picture of a portion of the last of the ’11 SFG season.  It really turned out to be another bumper crop year for us.  As time goes on, I am always hoping to give some little tips that I have used in my square foot garden.  I know there are many people who have had the total opposite experience that I have had with a SFG.  As I make my way to other gardens and teach classes, this usually boils down to two basic and correctable mistakes folks make when attempting to grow a SFG.  I spend time talking about this in my new ebook which should be available in about another week.  Boy, this whole website, ebook, WordPress, e-commerce thing sure has a serious learning curve!  Its been hard for me but I’m starting to get little pieces of it.  The first thing I do at the end of the season is to remove about half the soil and put it in a plastic tub as shown.  With my pitchfork, I loosen up the existing soil in the box, making sure I get all the corners.I then dump a lot of composted material in the box.  This is made up of all the things in my compost pile(about 20 different items), shredded twigs and leaves, and horse manure.  That’s quite a bit of organic material to add.  I will spread this around evenly.  Believe it or not, this really smells good.  When this is done, I then take the left over soil that I removed earlier, and top the garden off.  All that is left to do is to make sure its leveled-out and let it sit for a few months.  This particular garden had 3 growing seasons-produce in the spring, carrots, beets, cucumbers,  and squash in the summer, and more lettuce in the fall.  As much as I like the looks of the vinyl box, I still think I prefer the wood.  This was given to me by Mel many years ago as a leftover because he was working on a new box design to sell that’s easier to put together.  And, he figured it out.  The vinyl boxes sold by the foundation are great-but a little expensive.  Then again, you never have to treat or stain them, so maybe its a pretty good trade off.

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