Square Foot, Raised bed organic gardening

Here’s the next important principle involved in urban farming.  We’ve got a 4X4 or 8X4 or similiar sized box, filled with soil.  We need to turn this into a high density producer.

The main proponent of this type of high density vegetable farming is the square foot gardener.  You can buy his book and read his site, but here’s the general idea.  We take a small raised garden and divide it into 1 foot by 1 foot squares.  Each square is then fully seeded with a specific plant.  By taking advantage of the space in each square right to the edges, and by removing any rows in the garden it’s surprising how much you can pack in in the way of variety and volume of vegetables.

Now there’s two other things that came out of the course I took at our local bookstore on raised bed gardening.  First, we built our garden on the east side of the house instead of the west (for better sunlight).  That’s not relevant to this post but I wanted to mention that :).  Secondly, you can double plant stuff.  So in addition to having high density plantings, in some cases we can double up or vegetables in each square.

Oh, the third thing I learned is that this stuff isn’t rocket science.  Use your head, if it makes sense, try it.  So some of the stuff we’re doing may not work but it won’t likely be a complete catastrophe either.  Give it some thought, if it’s reasonable, do it.

Let me drift mildy off topic for a second.  I attended a raised bed gardening class put on by our local independent bookstore who brought in a fellow who run a nursery.  A couple things I learned, one relating to fertilization.

Here’s the way he put it - we’re all taught this in grade 5, then proceed to forget it as we get older.  Plants don’t eat soil or fertilizer.  They make their own food from the sun - photosynthesis.  Yes, they need some trace elements that may be removed from the soil by harvesting, but that’s about it.  It makes perfect sense when put that way.  We know grass will grow in the cracks of concrete, and if you’re Canadian you’ve probably seen cedar and pine trees growing out of the sides of granite cliffs.

So my intention with this garden isn’t just to use organic fertilizer, it’s to use no fertilizer.  I’ve got soil and compost as described previously. I expect I’ll turn our compost pile into the garden each year as well.  But that’s it.

OK, so you’re in suburbia. Your house is packed in like sardines with everyone else’s and your backyard is the size of a postage stamp. Also, like me, you’re mostly disinterested in hard work.

Welcome to the idea of raised bed bed gardening! For folks like us without the pleasure of a tractor and acreage, raised bed gardening is a perfect solution.

Raised bed gardening is exactly what it sounds like. You create a framework of some kind (using inexpensive materials), fill it with soil, plant. Later, you eat. Pretty simple.

Here’s what we did. My son and I headed over to Home Depot (I wanted to go to our local recycling shop but they were closed) and bought some barn board. It’s basically rough sawn pine all knotty and full of slivers. The stuff is 12″ wide and comes in lengths of 12 or 16 feet. We had it cut into two pieces of 8 feet and two pieces of 4 feet (giving us an 8X4 foot raised bed). A few screws later and I’ve got an 8X4 foot pine box in our back yard.

Next I bought a yard of triple mix soil from our local garden center to fill it. That’s part of what’s great about this technique - no turning of sod, no weeding, no worrying about the soil blend. Build the box, fill with dirt, ahem,not dirt but ’soil’. We filled the box about half full with the soil. Then we spread over the top the contents of our compost bin that we’ve been using for the past year. Nice thick black stuff, with the odd undigested egg shell and corn cob :). Gave it a bit of a mix with the shovel, then filled it all up with the rest of the soil.

It’s worth noting that by this point my son is ecstatic and enjoying this thoroughly. We’ve got all the latest Xbox 360’s, they’re gathering dust while he’s outside helping build this - no cajoling required.

I’ve been off eating chicken for many years. That seems like an odd statement, but it’s the initiative for this blog and our push into urban gardening.

I’ve got a farm background. Grwoing up we used to raise our own chickens and beef. I *love* chicken. Fried, shake and bake, roasted, boiled chicken and rice, I’ll eat it. But years ago the grocery store chicken became unpalatable to me. The factory raised and ’seasoned’ chicken just wasn’t something I could eat. And eventually my spouse felt the same way. The last time we had store bought chicken, it came out of the oven smelling nasty, with the bottom of the pan full of water. Water? From chicken? It went in the garbage.

So we started getting our chicken and our beef from local farmers. For chicken, we get organic free range chicken. It’s not necessarily all ‘certified’ but it’s different in a few respects from chain store chicken. First, it’s not injected with water and saline. Secondly, the chickens are roaming around loose. And finally, the chickens are older. The idea of eating 6 week old chicken, barely more than a chick, is also nasty - and I don’t have a problem eating chicken. In any event, we’re back to being a chicken eating family again, Yum!

The results of the chicken experience was that I did a slight bit of research on the area of local and organic farming. In addition, we’ve had various scares here in the last few years on food that’s processed by others.  Listeria in processed meats killing a few folks, E coli on vegetables all over the place, and so on.  So I am now a proponent (when convenient) of locally grown food. I don’t have any specific objections to factory farming, but everything combined (transportation costs, pesticides, material introduced during handling in unknown facilities in unknown countries, buying local) has shifted my preference to buying food where convenient, from local farmers.  So where possible, without shifting our lifestyle, we try to watch what we eat and where it was raised or grown.  It’s turning out to be relatively easy, less expensive, and better tasting than the alternative.

And that finally takes us to where we are now. Like many kids, my son is fascinated with growing things. So this year I decided to create an urban vegetable garden in our back yard (we live in a standard subdivision in a small town in Ontario). It’s an activity my son and I can do over the course of the summer, it’ll produce vegetables for our table, it’ll be something he can have fun with, and I expect we’ll have enough vegetables that he can proudly carry some vegetables over to the neigbhours.

One of the great things about this type of vegetable gardening is that almost anyone can do it.  It’s small, compact, easy to maintain, and high yield.