Towards Square Foot Gardening

Last week I was given a book called Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It contained details of a way to garden without the hard digging. It promises bumper harvests and reduced land and water use. While not entirely organic it does certainly suggest that organics is the way to go. You can check out some of the details here:


http://www.squarefootgardening.com/


So after work on Monday the sun was shining (its a lovely spring here in New Zealand at the moment) and I was inspired by Mel's words to have a go. I had been eying a patch of scrubby lawn that gets between 6 and 8 hours of sunshine a day. My soil is hard compacted and boggy clay but that's not a problem with Mel's instructions. I measured a four foot by four foot square out on the grass and laid into it with the spade. An hour later I had removed the top four inches of clay and loosened the soil below to the depth of my fork. Sweat was running and I was thinking hard about this no-dig stuff!

Mel has a recipe for soil mix on his website but I will have to source some vermiculite at the weekend. Being the impatient type I decided that I would use what I had on hand. A couple of bags of rotting horse manure looked good to start with so on that went. Then I covered that with a big sack (about 30-40 litres) of worm casts that I had pulled out of my worm farm a few days before. I had tried to be careful and leave all the worms in the farm but there were still quite a few wriggling around in my garden bed so rather than leave them open to the sun I covered them with a couple of inches of compost. Enough for one night I thought. Checked the bed next morning and thought it needed something else so on the way home I stopped by the river and grabbed a big sack of sand. Mixed that into the compost with a trowel and noticed that the level of soil was still a little below the surrounding grass. I added another couple of inches of compost and a sprinkle of lime and another of wood ash. Things looked a bit dry then so I gave the whole lot a watering can full of of dilute seaweed tea.

Some friends popped in for a cup of tea and a chat and were most appreciative of my efforts so far. Her tomatoes are the talk of the town and her cauliflowers are nearly too big for one person to carry so I was proper pleased.

Didn't get home from work until late tonight so all I did was replace the soil and remove the present that our cat had left for me in one corner of the bed. Doncha just love 'em!

I'm going to mulch the lot with chopped Ponga leaves tomorrow. Ponga is New Zealand's tree fern and it is quite slow to compost but the soil in our native forests is usually very lush so eventually I hope to have the same in my bed.