Has Anyone Tried Square Foot Gardening?

My husband just built the first box this week!! We haven't tried the mix yet, but my husband says it's important. He has been doing his research on it for months and he said compost and peat moss are easy to come by. It's the vermiculite that's expensive. He said that he'd read several threads that said without the vermiculite the garden suffered. It's what keeps the soil moist. You can find the vermiculite online and that's how we are going to order it. I know it's expensive but once you have it in there, you don't have to add it again.
I wish you luck. We are excited about starting! Don't forget to add marigolds to keep the bugs out!

We did that at my uncle's house (while I was living with them) last summer. It works pretty well, and isn't too hard. The mix is VERY important... when you have so much growth sucking the nutrients out of such a small area, you have to have very rich, diverse soil. My uncle has only had his gardens for the one summer, and they actually gave him quite a bit of produce... We will see how this season goes...

I can tell you that in any sort of gardening and landscaping that bed preparation is the single most important thing you can do...and the thing that people tend to skimp on! It is hard to get over the mindset of expensive "dirt" but you will be rewarded in the end. Having a good foundation makes your garden more disease and insect resistant. Not to mention drought tolerance.

It is expensive the first year, but you only need to add in consecutive years. Oh, and start your own compost if you haven't already!

i really love my square foot garden. follow the building instructions precisely. i thought i could handle bigger beds, and sure enough, the middle squares are very hard to reach. i end up putting flowers there, which works fine.
one thing i'd have done differently (and more recent editions may have changed) is to dig the beds much deeper, probably 2 feet. my 6-inch beds cause my carrots to have 45 degree bends.
i put landscaping fabric under the beds to prevent weeds but wish i hadn't. it took a couple of years and some piercing with a hoe to get worms back in my bed. mel says you don't need worms. i disagree.
i also use more compost than he calls for. vermiculite is expensive but necessary to give the soil aeration. but i like my soil to have a lot of organic compounds in it, so i use kitchen compost as well as well-aged horse manure (which is weedy but i have so much of it!)
i don't ever have to fertilize.
of course, it's a moot point right now. the stinkbugs decimated every single thing i planted last year. not sure if i even have the heart to try again this year, when they are predicted to be of biblical proportions.
khairete
S.

I've never read the book you referenced but we do square foot gardening at our place. We have a fenced area (40'x25'...total guess) that I fill a foot deep every fall with leaves, then we also have a compost pile we put kitchen scraps and yard debris in. In the spring, turning over the established squares is a piece of cake...no digging involved at all. My husband will use cotton burr compost but that's about all he adds. We must be doing something right because our pole bean vines grew so long last year that they broke their supports, and those were over 10' tall. (I also let our hens scratch around in the area all winter and they contribute their own brand of "compost".)

I say, don't stress about it.

K.

I just built 2 boxes for my MIL, they were simple to build - although with all the stuff and mix I am sure it all cost more than $100. Alos the coarse vermiculite was hard to find, we ended up getting it from the feed store.

I will let you know next year how they did!