Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

When, in 1981, Mel Bartholomew wrote his book Square Foot Gardening he introduced a method for both increasing the productivity of back yard vegetable gardens and at the same time preventing a glut of produce at harvest time. Twenty-five years later, the success of his ideas is attested to by the publication of a new and updated edition of the book, All New Square Foot Gardening.
From his experience with community gardens, Bartholomew understood that although people tend to get off to a roaring good start in spring, when they dig and clean and plant, a few weeks later reality sets in. The seeds need thinning and watering, the weeds are growing, and the cottage needs painting.
Soon enough the long row of spindly un-thinned lettuce has bolted to seed and the radishes have gone woody, split, and are as hot a hades. The tomatoes don’t get their suckers removed and. in no time, that part of the garden is an impenetrable mass of vines. The green beefstakes sit on the ground for the slugs, and then suddenly it’s August, everything ripens at once and you couldn’t give another tomato away if it had a five dollar bill stuck to it.
In essence, the lesson of gardening by the square foot is; if you can’t eat it when it’s ready don’t plant it and, if you can’t weed it, don’t dig it.
The classic square foot method is to prepare a growing area four feet by four feet and to divide it into sixteen squares, each one foot on a side. Each square is then planted to one sort of vegetable. One square foot will support sixteen carrots or onions or nine bush beans or beets. Four romaine lettuce will fill a square as will four parsley plants. A cabbage , a pepper and an egg plant will each take a whole one foot square.
Planting by the square foot takes discipline, planning and a degree of manual dexterity. Discipline is required to not plant all the seed that you buy. Radish, for instance, are cheap, so the package will have maybe a couple of hundred seeds, but you only need to plant sixteen. There will be several hundred carrot seeds and maybe you’ll plant thirty. Cabbage, you can grow just one plant. With conventional row cropping, all the seed gets planted and then most of it is thinned out once it germinates. The result might be the same but it doesn’t seem right to have planted all sixteen squares and to still have maybe $30.00 worth of seed in packets staring at you.
Realistic planning is essential. How many lettuce will you actually eat over the two or three week period before the plants go to seed. Deciding what plants to put beside each other also needs care. A single basil plant can quickly overpower a square of carrots if it is not rigorously clipped and used. The dexterity comes in with the seeding. Sprinkling a package of seeds along a shallow furrow is one thing; planting one carrot seed, and perhaps a spare an inch or so away, is a job for tweezers.
Although one needs a certain flexibility of mind to embark on square foot gardening, the method does offer definite advantages. For a start the amount of cultivated space needed to produce a given amount of crop is greatly reduced. To allow for access, rows of radishes or carrots would typically be planted a foot apart with the plants about 2" apart. Thus 16 radishes would take about two and a half square feet, more than twice the space needed in a SFG. Using less space equates to using less time. It is estimated that a single sixteen- square block will take about one hour per week to maintain and each addition four foot x four foot block will add another half-hour per week.
At Peel Teaching Garden we have a version of the square foot technique in the form of two raised box-beds. Each bed is 16" deep and is filled with about half a cubic yard of coarse garden-compost. The compost behaves like a giant sponge which retains moisture without becoming soggy. In the windy conditions in the garden, the large moisture reserve has resulted in a lush crop of salad greens which can be harvested at will by volunteers. The second bed was planted to various herbs and to carrots. As carrots grow best in loose organic soil it will be interesting to see what happens when they have almost ideal conditions instead of having to survive in droughty Peel clay.
Combining square foot gardening with raised box beds has several advantages and it is especially useful for people having to cope with very small spaces. Townhouse backyards are often enclosed in high fences which cast long shadows. Elevating the beds by a foot or two can raise the growing surface out of the shadowed area and materially increase the amount of sun the plants get. What passes for soil in most developments is very poor and extremely shallow; using raised box-beds allows for the creation of deep fertile soil without causing drainage problems for the neighbours. A couple of 4 x 4 raised beds, a foot or so apart and away from the fence, and surrounded by gravel, would look neat and might well supply all the summer salads that a small family could eat.