Square Foot Gardening

Sometimes I get too excited about learning something new that I get ahead of myself. We're not even out of our last freeze in Oklahoma, but I wanted to share with you: I'm starting a garden! I figured I'm knitting, cooking...so why not grow some of our own fresh produce?! (I'm on a journey to be more like the wife of noble character in Proverbs 31 (so along with these talents I bring honor to my husband))

Good friends of mine are preceding me on this journey. Zac and Abbey had several of us over one afternoon for lunch and we talked about gardening and Farmer's Markets. They showed me their garden outside and some flowers they had saved from the bitter Oklahoma winter. Their blog is here. Little Bitty Garden borrows a bit from the book All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. I'm about halfway through the book and I'm pumped! It's small, it's efficient, there won't be so much food that we can't finish....and no weeds!! You build the garden above ground which means that you mix the soil perfectly and never have to add another bit of soil again. You DO have to add compost every Spring, but apparently his compost method is the NON-stinky method.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because that's what the Little Bitty Garden blog and the Square Foot Gardening book are for. But I've planted my seeds (I decided to go the hard/money-saving route) indoors in a seed starting tray and I plan on building my outdoor SFG box, soon. You build a 4'x4' box out of 2x6s and lay a wood lathe grid on top. I'll also need to make a cage top with a wooden frame bottom to keep the rabbits and birds from eating my seedlings.

I remember when I was little my grandmother had a garden. The thing I remember the best was the tomatoes. There is nothing like an organic homegrown tomato. You can eat it like an apple. Just a sprinkle of salt and you're good to go. I guess I'm finding that my grandmother's generation are some of the last of a self-reliant and hardened breed. My grandmother quilted (beautifully!), crocheted, sewed, gardened, cooked and painted. We can't lose these skills. In a world where it's sometimes cheaper to buy the factory-made, I think we lose the "love in the stitches" our grandmothers imparted.