I love all folks who garden-especially those who grow our food-the farmers. But for me, the traditional row garden is too much work and farming is too big for my taste. We’re just a family of 3 now, so this 148 square foot garden is enough for us and 5 other families. It takes some planning to be as efficient as you possibly can be, but it’s pretty easily done. Take this picture for example. Even though our temperatures have been single digits for almost the entire winter at night, when I lifted up the low tunnel today my soil was perfectly loose and warm. If you can see the trowel off to the left side of the picture, you’ll notice it’s sitting a lot higher than the prepared bed. If you’ve been following this blog for any period of time, you’ll remember that I build my boxes up more towards the middle at the end of the growing season. That way, when it’s time to plant, I have 100% pure compost(which is where it came from)sitting in a square foot bed. I can move this extra dirt over to an empty SFG bed, and then start planting. When all these SFG beds are planted, I’ll have a fair amount of excess compost-always a good problem to have. I’ll place the extra compost in a large pot somewhere in the garden and when it’s time to amend a new square foot, I’ll have perfect soil to do it with. At that early of a date my compost is not even close to being done. Think of this as preserving compost. It’s in perfect condition just waiting to be used, and when you need it early in the season, your main compost pile isn’t ready. This is the perfect fix. It’s been protected all winter from water, snow, and ice. It took me about 5 minutes to prepare this bed. That’s my kind of gardening.[ois skin=”below post”]