Square Foot GardeningA small farm setting up our small garden

Ok, you now know that we are looking at having 8 4′x4′ boxes.  This will give us 128 total square feet of garden area (not much smaller than our first apartment, sad thing is, I’m not joking).

Also, we have already talked about what we are wanting to plant in our garden.  Mostly veggies but even a few strawberries.  YUM!!  Now I don’t know if what I am going to post below is the best use of space, but it is what I am thinking about for my boxes.

So the top of some of the boxes are where the vine plants would go, and this would be the north side of the boxes so the vines wouldn’t block the sun.  Now I don’t know if this is how everything will be planted.  I might move items around once I do more research on germination, growing season, time to grow, etc.  Some of these can be doubled up with spring/fall growing and I can grow more using the seasons.  So this is just a start, and not set in stone.

Any ideas on how to make this better?

We’ve just started to think about what we want to plant.  There are the veggies that we LOVE like corn, beans & tomatoes.  There are veggies that we really enjoy like zucchini, carrots, cucumbers, etc. (Then there is a small category of veggies that just Julia eats like radishes & beets).  We’ve made a list of what we want.  Then we looked at how many plants we could have per square foot (or how many square feet we’ll need per plant).  This has helped us look at how many of each plant we want, and how many squares we’ll need.  This isn’t a set list, but it has helped us to get started.

Now I don’t know if I’ve done all my math correctly, or if I have the right ratio of plants to square foot, but I’ll be changing that as we go.  This is how we came to the number of needed 8 boxes to start off with.  We may need to add boxes over the next year, or we may need to take some plants out.  We’ll just have to play it by ear right now.  Also, we have a number of vine plants, so almost every box will have a trellis on it.  That may change as I start placing them, looking at shade vs. sun, and other factors.  Right now I have the tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkin, and squash as vine plants.

Over all, I’m looking forward to our garden.  We’re still a little skeptical that you can grow all of this in just 6″ of soil, but we’re going to trust the book! 

I had to build a hay feeder for our alpacas, so I needed to purchase some wood to build that.  While I was there I thought it would be a good time to just pick up the 2×6’s I would need for our garden.  So far I figured we would start with 8 4′x’4 boxes.  That would give us 128 square feet for our first garden.  This might be too big for our first go at Square Foot Gardening, but we are a family of 5 and can eat and can the extras we might get.  This is also 772 square feet less garden than we have this year, and from my early guesses, we’ll get more out of the square foot garden than we have from the traditional garden.

I’ve thought about what we are going to plant, and how much we are going to plant and I’ll post about that later.  Right now I thought I would share what I have done so far.  First thing I did was purchase 16 2″x6″x8′ board.  Brought them home in our trusty trailer.

I do need to mention about this trailer is that it wouldn’t be street legal if it wasn’t for my father.  I couldn’t get the lights working at all, and my father came out and we completely rewired the trailer, and the lights still didn’t work.  My father figured out that since the trailer was old it probably wasn’t getting a good ground.  We rewired all the ground wires and now they work!  Thanks dad!!!

I was looking for a place to stack the wood so it wouldn’t get wet if it started to rain, but be out of the way until I was ready to put them together.  Well, I figured that at 8′ long I really didn’t have anyplace.

So I figured it was time to cut them.  As most 8′ long boards are, they are not exactly 8′ long but just a little bit longer.  I wanted to make sure that all sides were exactly 4′, so I measured from each end, marked 4′ and the made 2 cuts in each board.  That way, all 32 pieces are exactly the same length.

Lilian my daughter was a great help in measuring and cutting.  I tried to have her cut a few, but I think the saw scared her a little.  She was a great help though on all other areas.

Once we got the boards cut, we had a nice pile, and Lilian helped me stack them against the pig pen (that is currently being used as hay storage.

The are all stacked, and all I need to do now is pre-drill and then screw them together.  That won’t take long at all!  I should get a couple together this fall for some garlic, and to start getting the soil ready for next spring.

I’m excited about our new garden!

We are a small alpaca farm in Cottage Grove, Oregon, Silk Creek Alpacas.  We breed and raise alpacas and chickens.  We also are raising 3 wonderful daughters.  That is what brought us here to the farm.  We wanted to give our daughters a life where they could have room to run, where they could enjoy the country life, and enjoy what comes with that.  One of our goals since we were married has been to have a garden that would provide us with the food we would need, and then extra food so we could can it for the winter.

We have either lived in small apartments (400 sq. ft. at UO Westmoreland Student Housing), or in Glendale, Arizona (not much gardening there for us!!), or in the South hills of Eugene (Stupid deer!!).  So, we haven’t had much luck (read:  we’ve had terrible luck) with gardening.  This is the end of our first year on the farm, and we have had a garden, and it has gone pretty great.  This summer we’ve had corn, tomatoes, zucchini, squash, cucumbers, radishes, beets, onions, beans & carrots.

We’ve worked hard this year on the garden, but we’ve decided that it not where we really want it.  We’ve decided that next year we are going to move the garden to the front yard to better use the space up there.   We’re going to plant fruit trees where we have the garden right now.

I’ve been thinking about how we are going to do the garden in the front yard, and we really didn’t know how we wanted to do it.  We thought about a large plot like we did in the side yard.  We’ve thought about container gardening, we’ve thought about everything.  One day last week we were at Barnes & Nobel and I saw the book, All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.  I sat there in B&N and the book made sense to me.  Everything he was questioning about conventional gardening were the same questions I have had.  The main question is, if a plant only needs 3 inches between plants, why do you need 3 feet between the rows.  Seems like a waste of space to me.  I ended up buying the book, and then going to the web site, Square Foot Gardening to learn more.  The more I have read, the more I like this style of gardening.

This blog will be my story as I start Square Foot Gardening.  I’ve done nothing yet, so you will see it all.  From building the boxes, choosing what to plant, mixing the soil, planting, harvesting, and growing our garden over the next year and years.