Our Square Foot Garden

2 Weeks ago we decided to tackle our first square foot garden!

Cost: About $60 for wood, string, soil, and plants

We already had on hand the news paper for layering and we had natural non-toxic wood treatment. 

The basics are simple, 4 boards put together to make 4 internal feet x 4 internal feet. I mention this as you need to consider the depth of the wood your using and how your putting it together! Just putting nails in this wood was not quick like I thought it would be by the way. We used both nails and screws to make the joining tight. You might be able to see that in the above photo.

We used 2x4s to make the tall climbing back part, don’t ask me how high, I eyed it! Maybe it is wishful thinking that we will get things to grow that high. We shall see! Stringing the box was not hard, use nails or hooks. Really it isn’t needed on the bottom, you could eye a foot but this was also a learning experience for the kids!

4 x 4 is 16!

We put the wooden frame on the ground and sprinkled some garden soil over the edges so we could see the inside parameter when we moved the frame away. The we took a shovel and turned the grass over. The hot Georgia weather did not help! We then put the frame down on top of the turned over soil. We layered newspaper on it to prevent the grass/weed growth, then a layer of peat moss, then more newspaper, and then our soil. We went with organic soil though not all our plants we found are organic. We have to make do.  Even Crunchy Parents can’t be perfect!

As you can see we added beautiful sun flowers to the back right of the box. Sadly because we left our plants in the garage for days before planting, some didn’t recover well.

Our son planted lettuce seeds and radish seeds in two of the square feet. Something got to one of the bell pepper plants right away it seems.

Our cucumbers died very quickly! The nice FedEx guy took a moment to tell us about his garden and mentioned his cucumbers died this year too. We went looking for new ones and surprisingly 4 different places had none! Finally we found the last two plants at a home depot.

The raddishes took off right away, but way too crowded. I am told to space them at least an inch apart. Husband has been working on that. Thinning things out is hard on newbie gardeners! We just don’t want to stop anything green from growing! But it must be done!

This is the garden now. Everything is doing well but the sun flowers. I think we will pull them and plant some kind of beans that climb as we wait for the tomato plants in the back to need get big enough to need the support. We are loving this so far and want to put in another one just like this to plant other things. Of course we first need to figure out what will grow during this season and in such hot Georgia weather. It is almost hitting 100 here most days.

Ignore the over grown grass, the riding mower died and we are on 2 acres of grass. We just got the mower parts in so hopefully by the end of next weekend the grass will be all cut! (Plus, the tall weedy flowers in the yard have been good for the bees right? I will keep telling myself that to make myself feel better for being “those neighbors” with the over grown lawn!)

Happy Planting! Let me know if you have any questions or tips!