Square Foot Gardening 1 of 5 - Intro

Do you like a well-planned, orderly place? Then Square Foot Gardening may be ideal for you. This method is also great if, like me, you enjoy detail and general persnickityness.

Square Foot Gardening is wonderful for the new gardener or one whose space is limited. As long as it gets at six hours of direct sunlight per day, you could grow a charming little Square Foot Garden on your apartment balcony.

Several decades ago, Mel Bartholomew developed Square Foot Gardening and wrote a book by that name in 1981. Two million sold copies later, gardeners are still adopting his method, which has been updated in “All New Square Foot Gardening" (2006).

Square Foot Gardening is great for small spaces.

If you decide to give this garden method a try, you will build 4-foot-square wooden boxes and fill them with a special growing medium. Within each box you will grid out veggies, herbs or flowers, with each section 1 square foot.

Now, if you're a math whiz, and I know you are, you'll realize that each box will have 16 squares for planting. And if you take square foot gardening on faith, you will grow a crazy number of plants in very little space.

“All New Square Foot Gardening” lays it all out, and I have scoured the book many times. There seem to be so many advantages that I thought, “Why not?”

·        Watering - A square foot garden uses a lot less water than a traditional row garden.

·        Spacing - Instead of planting excess seeds then thinning them out to a specified spacing, in a square foot garden you plant them at that spacing. 

·        Lots of plants - you'll be amazed how many plants you will get in one square.

·        Weeds inside the box - You won't have many weeds within the box, and those you get will be simple to pull because the soil mixture is so loose.

·        Weeds outside the box - You're not watering surrounding weed seeds; correspondingly you won't have many weeds around your boxes.

·        Garden space - Square Foot Gardening takes up A LOT less space than conventional long-row gardening.

·        Planting medium - It uses a nutritious “soil” mixture that you never have to change or fertilize -- just add to it.

·        Portability - The boxes can be moved around.

·        Other - You'll be able to very easily conduct a system of companion planting and natural crop rotation. Plus you'll never have to till again.

Disclaimer: Since I bought a chest freezer (no wait, I mean a freezer that is a chest), I have much more room for my harvest, so I have gone back to the crazy yields of row gardening.

Ivy

I'm pretty sure this is English ivy.

Ivy climbs more than a 3-year-old, but it's the growth along the ground that's the hardest for me to keep in check. Unless you want ivy to fill in a certain space, which is pretty, you had better keep ivy reined in, or in my case, pulled up. Ivy is insidious, and thus is on my list of Plants That Take Over the World.

Ivy has about a dozen species and originated in Europe, northwestern Africa and Southeast Asia. My ivy likes dappled sunlight, or at least shade some of the day.

Useful tools 1

For the klutz who has everything, and too frequently cuts herself in the kitchen, here is a pretty good accessory:

G&F 57100 CUTShield Classic Cut & Slash Resistant Gloves on Amazon.

For the spray-paint project:  

Spray trigger at Big Box Land

Get rid of those snails and slugs

Snails and slugs are a menace to your plants. During the day most of the slimy guys snuggle down in the dirt and mulch. They emerge after dark with a powerful appetite for leaves and spend the night munching holes in your plants.

One sure sign of snails and slugs is called honeydew, or what I would call a slime trail.

When you get honeydew trails, you need to take action right away. You can use a commercially available snail bait (see your garden center). Or you can use diatomaceous earth. The diatoms you studied in junior high are all over the ocean floors, and somebody scoops them up to sell in bags. Diatomaceous earth is good for many kinds of soft-bodied bugs, not just slugs and snails. If an insect moves over diatomaceous earth, it cuts him to shreds. Gruesome, I know, but it's a good natural insect killer.

Afghan for a giantess

Who in their right mind would piece together such a gigantic afghan? That would be me. I needed a portable project and 9-inch squares seemed to fit the bill. The problem came when I wanted to crochet together the squares ... a big pain considering how many granny squares I crocheted. The afghan is actually twice as long as shown. What was I thinking?

Failure-to thrive chives

The picture says it all. I planted quite a few types of herbs, and they've all come up except the chives. I've never had any luck with chives. I did read that it's better to plant chives (seeds) in the fall. And to find someone with thriving chives and ask them to divide the clump and give you a little.  Any advice? Please comment.

Worth going off your diet for

This Banana Pudding is oh so decadent and is correspondingly irrestible. You'll see that the ingredients make it extra fattening, but I still get special requests for it.

Technique is key, so be sure to follow the instructions. You'll end up with little dabs of cream cheese and Cool Whip within the pudding mixture. The reason it's so irrestible is that with each bite you never know what dab of deliciousness you'll be sending across your tongue. This, of course, makes you want to consume more and more.

This is a recent banana pudding before I topped it with Cool Whip
and vanilla wafers. Notice magazine-like styling of the ingredients.

Karen's Banana Pudding

8 oz cream cheese, softened

1 can Eagle Brand milk (aka sweetened condensed milk)

1 large box instant vanilla pudding

3 cups milk

1 large Cool Whip, half unthawed and half thawed

1 box vanilla wafers

3 bananas (but let's face it, who cares about the bananas?)

Combine dry instant pudding mix, milk, Eagle Brand milk, and half of Cool Whip. Technique: For the softened cream cheese, add it one pinch at a time. For the unthawed Cool Whip: add it one small spoonful at a time.

Mix with hand mixer until pretty well incorporated, yet leave a lot of small dabs (culinary term).

In 9x13 pan:

Bottom layer: half of the vanilla wafers, half of the bananas, then all of the pudding mixture. Make sure the pudding covers and coats the bananas.

Top layer: the rest of the Cool Whip (wait until it thaws all the way), then decorate with the rest of the vanilla wafers.

Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Give this Banana Pudding a try and let me know what you think. Please leave me a comment below!