SFG Bed Gardening
SQUARE FOOT GARDENING
GROW MORE IN LESS SPACE, WITH LESS WASTE, WITH SFG
Square Foot Gardening is one of the easiest, most productive ways to grow vegetables without the weeds, work, and waste of a traditional row garden! The Square Foot Gardening (SFG) Method was created by Mel Bartholomew and uses less water, soil, space, and fewer tools.
Reduce, reuse, and recycle are big themes in the SFG method. You can build a Square Foot Garden in your backyard, on a rooftop or balcony, or in a community garden.
By using Mel’s Mix™ – a special growing soil that you can make yourself – and adding a grid for plant spacing, you’ll have an easy-to-maintain system to grow your own food. Perfect for new
gardeners!
THE 10 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF SQUARE FOOT GARDENING:
1. Plant densely. With compact beds, permanent grids and plant spacing guides, SFG lets you grow an amazing amount of produce in a much smaller area. Old fashioned row gardening wastes space, water, seeds and labor.
2. Grow up. Vining vegetables take up so much space when left to sprawl on the ground. But trellis them, and your cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, squash, peas and more will be further away from ground-level critters that nibble.
3. Mel’s Mix™, not garden soil. With SFG, you’ll grow an amazing harvest in Mel’s Mix™, not the dirt in your yard. We’ll show you how easy it is to make your own growing medium, invented by Mel himself.
4. Garden close to your home. Gardens are more efficient when near a water source. Keep your SFG close to your house so it’s easier to check on and tend.
5. Grow shallow. Raised beds don’t have to be deep: a mere six inches of Mel’s Mix™ is all it takes for most veggies. And Mel’s Mix™ is perfectly pH balanced for most vegetables.
6. Fertilizer-free. The composts in your Mel’s Mix™ provide all the nutrients your crops need. Just add fresh compost when you replant a square.
7. Keep aisles between boxes narrow. This reduces the chance for weeds to show up, like they can with long rows of veggies. Aisles between your SFG boxes should be about three feet apart.
8. Be stingy with seeds. We don’t thin seeds with SFG. That old way is a big waste! We use a simple 1,4,9, or 16 seed planting guide in each square. The friable, loose, moisture-trapping qualities of Mel’s Mix™ make it the perfect germination medium.
9. Plant in squares. Your 1-foot SFG squares let you plant efficiently, and easily rotate in new crops when the first veggies are done producing.
10. Rotate crops. Plant rotation is automatic in a SFG and gives the maximum yield from your garden. The harvest from a 4’ X 4’ bed will surprise you, because many squares can be planted at least twice – and sometimes a third time – in a gardening season.
Square Foot Gardening … the proven way to grow more in less space, without the hard work.
Visit: www.squarefootgardening.org and they will show you how to grow delicious, organic
veggies your first year!
Square Foot Gardening
A Way Of Life!
Learn More:
Pick up a copy of “All New Square Foot Gardening,” Third Edition by Mel Bartholomew.
Sign up for our Square Foot Garden Training by SFG Certified Instructor – Bruce Eckman.
