I recently ran across a gentleman's website that talked about a revolutionary new gardening method called Square Foot Gardening. Apparently this guy goes all over the world for gov'ts to teach 3rd world starving ppl how to grow food with almost no space. I was thinking about buying his book, but wanted to see if anyone knew anything about it. Does it work? Anyone try it before, or hear of it? Any info would be helpful

Here is ours from florida when we lived there now we have others but not pictures yet.

www.shtfm.com/post18979.html#p18979

Here is the post on the square foot gardening
www.shtfm.com/gardening/square-fo ... tml#p18158

A quick and dirty method that we have used for years.

1. Buy bags of soil. Lay flat on ground. Place a board barrier abound say every rectangle of four.
2. Cut the plastic off of the up side of the bags. This effectively turns them into big planters.
3. Plant seeds and water.
4. Watch grow and harvest. (We have had very few weeds grow in this for the first couple of years.)

This can be divided down to the square foot sizes or you can just do each bag with all the same type of seeds or plants.

Deep root crops like carrots don't get huge with this method. However it is amazing how many potatoes grow in this medium. Especially compared to our clay soils we have here.

Thanks for the responses and the advice guys. It is much appreciated. It would definitely suck being a newbie food grower without some of the advice and suggestions I found here. Thanks to everyone who contributes great info on www.shtfm.com

I am one of the few that did not care for the book or the method. I found it way too fussy for me.
I garden in raised beds, and find that it is a very efficient way of growing (like in the book), however, instead of the fancy grid and having to check the what can be planted here or there and in what amounts, I look at my seed pack. If it says plant your beans 4" apart in rows 18" apart, you can eliminate the rows and simply plant 4" apart in all directions.

Raised beds allow the soil to be worked better, it never compacts (which decreases the growing of the plants), allows you to customize and improve the soils better. It also helps with watering and weeding.
In raised beds, planted intensively (the method I use), you can litterally double the productivity of the garden space.

I used some scrap cedar siding torn down from my garage to build a frame for planting my leafy greens. 6 or so inches deep and about 4x4 feet...cabbage and spinach grows well when filled with Miracle-Gro and topsoil. For my melons and cucumbers, I used the kids old plastic sandbox (hey, they've outgrown it and it was designed to hold dirt!) For both the greens frame and the sandbox I had to drill some drainage holes in the bottom and I lined them with landscape fabric prior to adding soil. Works perfectly. For my potatoes, I had an old rectangular frame (about 2'x5' and made out of 2"x8" boards) that used to surround my sump outlet. It has no bottom or top and I placed it over a bare patch of the back yard, worked up the soil inside, threw in a bunch of old potatoes, covered with sand and straw and now my potatoe plants are about a foot high.

I'm keeping my eye out for more kid's sandboxes that people throw out...they're perfect for raised beds.

I am very limited on space - this square foot gardening was amazing. The yield is 3-4x more for the space that we have. I'll be sure to post some pics later on. Very worth it though

i had trouble finding vermiculite, so i went with expanded shale which is easy to get here in North Texas.

Small yard excellent ideas
Thanks