Square Garden Design: Guide to Square Foot Gardening Spacing

Square foot gardening. www.colourfulpalate.com

If you haven’t read my blog on rich soil, please do so.  Today can be seperate from it, but the gardening posts are all interconnected.

When I began writing this post, it became extremely long because so much of this subject works together, so please forgive me if it seems that I leave some small holes in the Square Foot Garden Design.  I hope to fill those gaps in near posts.  Allow me to begin discussing what a Sq Ft Garden is.

A small square foot garden design is typically defined by a 4 foot x 4 foot square that has been seperated into 1 x 1 squares.  This makes a total of 16 squares.  This is  a very methodical approach to companion planting.  Companion planting is planting several different types of plants next to each other that compliment each other in many ways.  They can give soil nutrients that the other needs.   Another reason to square foot garden is the insane amount of produce from one square foot garden.  If you create a matrix of these four foot squares, with a few feet in between, you can have convenient walkways between very efficient beds.

The typical garden begins with a 2×4 or 2×6 square frame, and then using a .5×1 lattice structure (or my favorite: PARACHORD) to seperate each into the 1 sq ft sections.  Each of these can hold a precise amount of a vegetable, depending on the vegetable.  The below photo shows how plants can be placed in the 1 foot square.  Each Big square is 1×1 feet.SMALL SQUARE GARDEN DESIGN

I found a pretty good informational guide on the amount of items in a square, although it isn’t extremely pleasant looking.  Using these guides, you can see how the space can be used to gain ALOT of produce.  If you look above, this one 3 foot by 4 foot (not the 4×4 I was talking about, but still the same idea) garden produces 1 pepper plant, a cabbage plant, 1 broccoli plant, 4 leafy lettuce, 4 swiss chard, 4 marigold, 9 beets, 9 spinach, 9 bush beens, 16 onions, 16 radishes, and 16 carrots!!!!  Now look at what you can grow in a normal bed in the below photo.

www.vegetable-gardening-online.com

What is another really cool thing about the 4 foot squares?  Winter time!  They are the perfect base for a PVC based greenhouse.  See below:

This year I plan on several of these beds this year.  It is an engineer’s dream plus a raised bed plus a greenhouse.  Tomorrow, I plan to write on choosing the plants that go in your garden.  The obvious next step after Rich Soil and Square Garden Design is to look at the plants.  Keep Reading!

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