Preparedness: How To Begin “Square Foot” Gardening

by | Apr 13, 2020 | Headline News | 10 comments

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    Square foot gardening is a simple method of creating small, orderly, and highly productive kitchen gardens. You may have even seen them before.  With people leaning more and more towards preparedness, their popularity is growing.

    It was invented by backyard gardener, retired engineer, and efficiency expert Mel Bartholomew as a better way to grow a vegetable garden, and it became a huge hit when he introduced the idea to the gardening public in 1981 in his book Square Foot Gardening.  The best part about this approach is that you only need a small amount of space to grow an efficient garden – and it can be done indoors.  This is valuable to those who live in cooler climates.

    The basic concept is to create a small garden bed (4 feet by 4 feet or 4 feet by 8 feet are common sizes) and divide it into a grid of 1-foot squares, which you manage individually. Seeds or seedlings of each kind of vegetable are planted in one or more squares, at a density based on plant size (e.g., you’d plant about 16 radish seeds per square, but only one tomato plant). Since there are no paths, there is no wasted space, and the soil in the bed stays loose because you never step on it. If you aren’t able to build your own garden bed, there places you can purchase premade beds.

    The one huge advantage to making the garden bed yourself is that you can build it to fit where you want it and the amount of food you want to grow.  The one disadvantage is that startup costs can be high even if you make your own beds. The expense of building even a small raised bed and filling it with soilless mix has the potential add up quickly. If you do have good soil to work with, stick with the original method and form in-ground garden beds for much less money.

    The following guideline may be of use to you.  These can be found all over the internet with minimal searching.  It’s easy enough to find one that can work for you and the space you’ve got to work with.

    Gardening and preparedness have both become more popular in the wake of the government’s overreaction to the coronavirus, which has crippled food supply lines, and impoverished millions already.  Self-sustainable lifestyles were not popular even two months ago, but all that has rapidly changed.  Seeds are not impossible to come by, but we suggest you choose heirloom varieties, so you can save your own seeds and replant them indefinitely.

    4 Reasons To Choose Heirloom Seeds For Your Garden

    Heirloom seeds will also produce vegetables that will be easier to regrow in water.

    Preparedness: How To Regrow Vegetables In Water

    Taking small steps toward a more self-sustainable lifestyle and being less dependent on government handouts and the weak food supply chain will give people a leg up when the coming economic collapse truly makes its impact felt.

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      10 Comments

      1. h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Garden#/media/File:Houghton_AC85_B9345_911s_-_Secret_Garden,_1911_-_cover.jpg

        It looks like a failure, or it looks successful. It never looks like somebody else’s. Most sheeple cannot live without a power dynamic. So, it gets dickered with, if you can’t hide it like contraband.

        • one acre garden, motion detector and buckshot, works on all sort of critters and you can eat some of them.

          • If surrounded by walls, hedgerows, or dogs, someone will find a problem with what they can see.

      2. do ghetto style gardening. throw old potatoes in the ground. harvest seed from last years vegetables. slice up an heirloom tomato collect the seeds rinse off the slime on the seeds place the seeds on papertowel to dry out. do same with cucumbers. you can plant dry bagged beans. take your neighbors leaves in the brown paper bags in the fall. collect your coffee grinds banana peels egg shells grass clippings. add your rabbit shit. dump the leaves manure and the kitchen scraps and spread them out then go over them with lawn mower. throw all that shit in a pile water and turn it with a digging fork here and there. it doesnt have to get hot. you will see worms everywhere in the pile if you keep it moist. early spring screen it with hardware cloth 1/2 inch mesh. you will have loose fluffy compost. you want damn near free veggies. i dont mess with soil tests dont use pesticides or city water. just rainwater collected. plants like rain water. you can spend your money at the garden center if you want. i wont enjoy a store bought garden. thats just me.

        • Good info ASSHAT. Go score free wooden pallets, build some rabbit hutches and chicken coops. They are disappearing fast behind businesses. NO product coming is so these are limited. Just ask them if you have have the pallets for free. Build a chicken house mobile tractor and keep your flock mobile and protected. Need to pick up yards of 1/2 inch mesh cloth and all the hinges and hardware now. Lost of screws and roofing nails and some tar paper and metal corregated roofing. Get busy folks, Long term food storage begins today, and buy bags of cracked corn for attracting wild life. My 4 wild deer wait for me at the door in the morning, to throw out some corn like pets. Natures free range pets/ future food source if needed. And the main doe looks preggo again, and I could have 5 or 6 here by mind summer. They are free to go anytime they want, but they love my property, because it is safe for wild life. NO Domestic Cats or Dogs allowed here period. They scare everything away. Useless eaters for your entertainment. All day long here with no dogs or cats, I have lots of wild rabbits grazing and fattening, squirrels fat n happy, raccoons at night fattening. Glad I got out of the city years ago. Hillsborough Co, Tampa FL just put on a Curfew 10PM to 5AM. No kidding. Martial law, commie city. Get your gardens working, no time to fiddle.

      3. I really think that the CIA colluded with Silicon Valley and Wall Street to hi-jack the Sanders movement to rewrite it to suit their needs. I have been listenning to all of these Sanders supporters on Sputnik. They love Sanders spending, and want to increase it, but they refuse to discuss the massive corruption taking place, and they are extremely pro-surveillance.

        What is the point of surveillance? We have more surveillance, more corruption, and more crime than ever. We have never had so many failed foreign policies simultaneously, under unprecedented surveillance.

        If surveillance cameras prevented crime, the police and military would not have any other weapons, they would just photograph the criminal, and he would fall just to the ground unconscious.

        Let me know how a surveillance camera prevents crime, especially when you can’t even rely on the surveillance camera.

        • What’s that got to do with square foot gardeing?

      4. Square Foot Gardening

        How cute.

        This is for people who have no idea how much food it takes to live on YoY. You get a little taste of each type of vegetable, but nowhere near enough to preserve for food to last until the next harvest. This is just for a hobby…not for survival.

        Reads like a Daisy Luther “globetrotting blogger who left home” post rather than a real prepper article.

        • The secularists make a legitimate point about carrying capacity.

      5. I’ve done this method in the past and I find that it is great way for beginner gardeners to get started because of its textbook method of planting. I had to build ‘boxes’ of 2×2 lumber and chicken wire to keep critters from eating it. I put hinges on one side so that all I had to do was flip it open to weed and harvest.

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