Square foot gardening

My neighbor, Amber, and I have been planning to do a little gardening together for about a month now.  We've been waiting for the possibility of overnight frost to pass.   My block is part of a three-block triangle that has a bit of common land behind the houses in the center.  J. and I own 1/17th of this common area as per our deed, but we've never used it because we don't have access to it.  Our yard is fenced and there is no gate in the far back of it.  But Amber's yard flows seamlessly into this common area, and she wanted to do a little vegetable gardening this summer.  When I heard that, I offered my help.  I'm not an experienced gardener, really, but my parents and grandparents had gardens.  My grandparents actually had a ginormous garden with everything under the sun in it.  I remember loving all the produce that came out of it in the summertime.  A little bit of gardening knowledge passed via osmosis to my brain, enough to know stuff like don't plant 15 cucumber plants unless you want to start a pickle factory and spent all of August canning.  That kind of stuff.  And one summer in my twenties I set up a community garden for a community of refugee Bosnians who wanted to get their fingers in the soil and grow stuff.  I liaised with a garden initiative and got a church to donate the land for the plots, but the Bosnians didn't need any help from me as to the gardening itself.  They really knew their stuff.  I learned a lot from them, though probably a good deal of it has sifted out of my mind since 1996.

In any case, Amber took me up on my offer so I went down to the basement to look at my gardening reference section.   There I found Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.  This book is great if you want to garden in a limited space or in raised beds or pots.  It shows you how to use your space most efficiently, what to plant next to each other, and when to plant what.  For the last week I've been gathering seeds and plants, and we took them all out to the garden we'd measured and grided out (Amber really did that) and planted them yesterday.  I'm pretty excited about doing this.  I love seeing things grow.  I love the taste of fresh home-grown tomatoes, and I want to see how well the garden does and what the possibilities in that growing space are.  I'm also looking forward to getting to know my neighbor better.  

Of course, despite the prep work and the lovely weather, all didn't go exactly smoothly.  Max wanted to help and I had to work actively to keep him from trampling or over watering all the plants.  Milo got upset that he was left behind in the yard and dug a hole underneath the fence, escaped and had to be recovered.  It was a bit of a circus.  It's hard to concentrate on what to plant next to the broccoli for complementary effect when your kid is demanding every five seconds that you cut more string so he can tie more "grid" or your puppy balks at being contained, but, in the end, the work got done.  Some days I feel like I'm losing my marbles:  what's 112 inches divided by two?  Uh, wait...it'll come to me...when I don't have to worry about where Max is...he was here just a second ago...    Other days I know those marbles are gone - bought and sold on Ebay and now in a collection in Santa Fe.  Good-bye to those math skills, hello to being able to tie shoes and remember Dora the Explorer lyrics at the same time.  

Anyway, here are some pics:

tags: gardens  gardening  square foot gardening  gardening with kids