this time of year in your square foot garden. It’s hard spending all this time planning, planting, watering, and caring for your gardens ony to come out one morning to discovered it’s all been killed off by an unexpected frost. I think it’s a good idea to get in the easy habit of looking at the weather forecast. When I looked today I saw the following projected evening low temperatures: 51/41/32/35/40/42. We are usually colder in our neighborhood than they are where they record the official temperatures. Of course, by limiting the size of our gardens, it’s a simple matter of protecting them with plastic. There is no way you’re going to be able to do that with a traditional garden. Well, not easily anyway. So knowing this, I won’t cover my gardens tonight, but I will for the next several days. That way I won’t have to worry about anything I’ve grown being ruined by a frost. This picture shows my sugar snap peas. These are planted 8 per square, and you plant them just as they’re shown-at the back of the box. You will find some bad advice about how to grow sugar snaps in the SFG method on the internet. This way they grow right on up the strings. If you look closely you will see that I use tent posts to push into the ground to make the string taut. If you’re string/nylon is not tight, things will start to droop instead of climb. I should have my first batch of sugar snaps in about 10 days. One last thing-you will notice some empty space in front of the sugar snaps. This can be used to plant more letuce, spinach, carrots, onions, etc…..t [ois skin=”below post”]

From the previous picture you can see that I have repositioned the vertical grow tower.  Now I can cover everything perfectly.  But since sugar snaps are a cold weather crop I won’t need to cover them-unless we get a lot of snow.  In past years I have planted these only to have them sit under 6-8 inches of snow for an extended length of time.  Even though they’re a cold crop, if they’re exposed to this much water for this long without any sun or the chance to dry out, they will end up rotting in the ground.  These seeds have been soaked in water for 20 minutes.  You can also see that I only put 2 seeds per hole.  This is a new variety that I’m trying from Johnny’s.  I liked the other variety that we’ve always grown but when I read that this was more prolific and sweeter I had to go with it.  Let’s see how long these take to come up and let’s see how much we get.  Today I’m starting my 2012 SFG diary.  Us square foot gardeners aren’t used to keeping charts because it’s such a simpe method of gardening without all the fan-fare.  I will be logging everything I do in the garden and keeping track of the yields.  Along with these sugar snaps I also planted 16 heads of lettuce in my 1X4′ box.  We should have another great year in the garden.  By the way-has anyone seen the price of loose-leaf lettuce lately?…..

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is this.  I hope I can explain it clearly.  This is a portion of my 2X16′ bed thats been covered with 6-mil plastic in preparaton for heating up the soil.  As you can see from this picture the plastic can’t cover the last 4′ of my box completely.  The reason-and this is the mistake-is that I put my tomato tower in the wrong place.  This was used last year to grow sugar snap peas.  It will be used again for them in the next few days.  My mistake was that I put the tower to much in the center of these squares instead of the back of the box.  Things grew great on the tower last year but because I didn’t move the tower toward the back of the box, now when I cover it with plastic I can’t cover it entirely.  The tower is in the way.  It’s an easy enough fix though.  As soon as the soil heats up I will pull off the tower, remove the 2 pieces of rebar which reinforce the tower and then move everything back to the edge of the box.  I will then be able to completely enclose my 2X16′ square foot garden.  I hope you can see the advantages with limiting the size of your garden.  In a traditional single row garden you couldn’t do this.  First, your soil is nowhere near being ready.  You’re neighbors are at least 2 months away from rototilling their garden area.  Second, how do can you protect those kinds of gardens?  Maybe there’s a way but it’s got to be a huge thing to figure out.  There’s lots of huge things about traditional single row gardens…including the huge amount of time you spend pulling weeds while us SFGers are out enjoying and harvesting our organic veggies and produce….

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It does this!  It’s about time to start thinking of planting sugar snap peas.  A little later today I will make my way out to the garden and cover it in preparation for heating up the soil.  The weather is reporting that by Sunday it should be in the low 50’s.  With that, my 2X16′ garden will be ready to plant in about a week.  I’l try to get some good pictures of the apparatus that I use to protect my gardens.  It’s all rather simple and just takes a little bit of time to put it all in.  I have a series of three pictures in gallery 1 that shows what I have done to amend this particular bed.  I do the same with all of my beds but this gives you a visual of how it’s done.  The picture is a 2X4′ bed that has been emptied of its contents, leaves added and then finishing the whole box off with homemade compost.  All those leaves?  When I turn the soil over with a trowel-the only tool you’ll need in a square foot garden-all of them will be gone.  They will be completely decomposed.  The result is a rich, vibrant and healthy soil that you can grow just about anything in.  Because you never walk on your soil and you’ve amended it with compost you no longer have a need for heavy equipment like rototillers, shovels, etc.   That soil is going to plump right up.  It’s so lose, friable and even fragrant that you can almost hear it saying back to you ” please plant me!”  Start thinking of having your own square foot garden this year.  It’s the only way to go.  No weeding, no heavy digging, no hard work, no kidding….

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