If you don’t have the right soil mix, it’s a gamble on whether or not you’ll have a great square foot garden. The perfect soil can be made-mixed-in less than 20 minutes. What’s the main complaint during the garden season with your neighbors besides weeds? It’s “my soil is terrible…” The perfect soil is made up of equal parts-by volume not weight-of peat moss, compost, and course vermiculite. If you can’t find course, get medium. If you can’t get medium, get fine. If you can’t get vermiculite at all, don’t buy perlite. It’s useless in these gardens. This gets to be rather pricey, but it’s a one time expense if you make your own compost. If you don’t, you’ll always need a bag of compost around to amend your soil throughout the year. I bought one of those Rubbermaid tubs at K-Mart-the kind with ropes on each end. It’s simply a matter of filling that up to the top with peat moss and dumping that in your box. Do the same thing with the vermiculite and the compost. Mix it all up and wet it down. It’ important to do this. These gardens hold a tremendous amount of water because of the vermiculite. And that’s one of the main reasons we use it. I’ve made my own compost for 14 or 15 years and it’s easy. It’s also free with all the waste ingredients that come out of your kitchen. If I had to go out and buy commercially available compost, this is the variety I recommend. It doesn’t have any wood chips in it, and it doesn’t have any peat moss. This is unlike the Kellogg’s brand which has quite a bit of wood chips in it. This product has 8 or 9 different things in it which make it an excellent choice. How much soil will you need? Easy. All you do is take the measurements of your garden box. Let’s say it’s a single 4X4′ box. 4X4=16. Because you only need 6 inches of soil, you now cut that number in half. So that leaves you with 8 cubic feet of soil ingredients that you’ll need to fill your box. That means you will need approximately 3 cubic feet of vermiculite, 3 cubic feet of compost, and 3 cubic feet of peat moss. If you box was 4X8′ it would be different. 4X8=32. 32 divided by 2 equals 16. So this means you would need approximately 5 cubic feet of each of the 3 ingredients, plus a tad more to finish it off. I use compost to finish everything. Pretty simple. Now you have your box and it’s filled with the perfect soil that took you 20 minutes to mix. You’re almost ready…

[ois skin=”below post”]

It can be any length you’d like but it shouldn’t be any wider than 4′. It can be shorter than that too-just like the picture. This is for our daughter and son-in-law. They don’t have a lot of room so this 2X4′ will fit perfectly for them. That’s only 8 squares of planting. We’ll be filling it with crops that love cold weather, are easy to grow, and that taste great(doesn’t it all?) Your box can be made out of wood, vinyl, bricks, ammo boxes(although they’re a little deep), railroad ties(the newer ones), etc. Screw them together with regular deck screws-at least 2 on each side and preferably 3. Be sure to rotate the corners as it shows in the picture. Try to make sure you put it in a place that gets a minimum of 6-8 hours of sun. And how deep does it have to be? Only 6 inches! That’s it! These are 2X6″ pieces of wood that I picked out of a trash bin near some new construction in the neighborhood. Free wood is the best! It takes about 10 minutes to drill this together. Next up: step 2-the perfect soil and my recommendations for commercially available compost. This is one of the biggest things to understand about the SFG system. If you get this wrong, all the other advantages of SFGing go away. It’s the biggest reason for failing in the SFG system.

[ois skin=”below post”]

This week I’ve collected all the seeds I’ll need for an early spring garden. I also built this cold frame out of scrap wood laying around the house. I really didn’t need one, I just wanted one. This will be perfect for use in early spring and winter this year. When I look at the soil inside the cold frame I can still notice a shadow of about 6″ in the front of the bed. This is being cast by the wood in the front of the cold frame and the sun still being a little bit low. I’d say if you want to have success in a cold frame early, make sure that the entire soil area in the cold frame gets 100% sunlight with no shadows. As I’ve watched weather underground I can see that the low’s for evening temperatures are a little below freezing for the remainder of the month. That, along with noticing there will be 10 hours of sunlight on January 30th tells me it’s soon time to start planting. In two weeks I’ll begin direct seeding right into the cold frame and the garden beds. Next week I’ll begin to start a few things indoors-leeks, a few varieties of lettuce, poc choi, and chard. There’s still quite a bit remaining in the garden right now-carrots, potatoes, spinach, arugula, rosemary, parsley, and mache. It’s been a fun winter experimenting with all sorts of different things. Spring season is getting closer.

[ois skin=”below post”]