Some people may have already noticed, since it is quite visible from the road, we have been planting a vegetable garden for the past few weekends! It is not a traditional vegetable garden, but a so-called ’easy’ vegetable garden. In an ’easy’ vegetable garden, you use wooden containers to grow your plants in. This concept was invented in the US and is therefore called square foot gardening.
Why ’square foot gardening’?
Well we simply thought it would be fun to try! In square foot gardening, you create a kind of grid in each growing box with dimensions of 30x30 cm, hence the name "square foot gardening. There is a lot of advice on the Internet about how many plants to put in one 30x30 cm compartment. Of course, this is not the only advantage!
The square foot garden suffers from slightly fewer weeds than a traditional vegetable garden, because you are not growing in direct soil. It may be a little more work to create these raised beds but it should be easier to maintain (at least that's what they say).
How to create a square foot garden?
We do not have any experience with creating and maintaining a vegetable, so it it is all a matter of trying. First, we dug up 40 m2 of ground and then we placed a sheep fence around it. This was quite a job! Fortunately, we had help from our dog Storm and Barry the sheep.
Next, we distributed 3 m3 of wood fibers over it. On the photo you can see the huge amount of wood fibers needed. The vegetable garden raised beds are made of simple wooden pallet trays that we finished with linseed oil to preserve the wood. The wooden frames have permeable root cloth on the inside. The vegetable garden trays are filled with fertilized garden soil (for one tray you need about 0.3 m3. The grids that are used to seperate different kinds of plants are made from bamboo canes. Hopefully we can grow and harvest some tasty vegetables and fruits in the coming months!
