Gardening & Food Storage Pt III
Learn how starting a square foot garden of your own can help your long term food storage plan by lowering costs and giving you and your family delicious and nutritious fruits and vegetables from your backyard! If you haven’t done so already, check out our prior entries in our summer series: Gardening & Food Storage as well as Gardening & Food Storage Pt II
The garden’s in full swing and is starting to look more like a jungle than two raised square foot gardening beds!
The lettuce and zucchini plants are already yielding produce less than 30 days after planting them! As you can see from the picture above, the garden is starting to become overcrowded..
In hindsight, we’re planning on making the following changes next year to improve:
- Keep vertical plants (such as the tomatoes, beans, and zucchini) kept to the 4 outer grids of each bed. If limited to just one side’s outer grids, it should make them much more manageable and prevent them from choking out smaller plants around it…
- Instead of the teepee style sticks with hanging twine, we’re planning to use one of the vertical methods (picture below) mentioned in the book ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’ by Mel Bartholomew.
Other than that, everything else is coming along great and we haven’t encountered any problems. Pests are leaving the garden alone after the physical and Liquid Fence
deterrents were implemented, and the weathers been ideal for gardening (mostly sunny days in the upper 80’s). Daily maintenance remains around five minutes at near dusk to water the plants. There still haven’t been any additional weeds we’ve noticed than the one we found last week.If you haven’t started your own square foot garden to exponentially (and economically) increase your food storage plan, what are you waiting for!?
Pick up your copy of ‘All New Square Foot Gardening’ by Mel Bartholomew today to get started!