Square Foot Gardening: Keeping It Growing
We’ve commenced our 3rd year in backyard square foot gardening! We still don’t entirely know what we’re doing, but it’s a fun experiment each year. And while it’s a little work to keep it going, the benefits are well worth the family effort!
- Fresh organic produce
- Backyard convenience
- Learning about plant growth from seed to harvest
- The accomplishment of growing your own food
- Family involvement/excitement
So far our peas are looking great and we’ve also added lettuce starters. Since this picture the green beans are popping up nicely, along with sunflowers, and the cucumbers just started peeking through the ground. A red, yellow, and jalapeño pepper plant were added to three of the squares. I’ve also added a couple of pots of fresh herbs – lavender, lemon thyme, rosemary, and orange mint. {Need to add some basil.}
The most popular item in our garden however, is the strawberry plants! Our garden has expanded to add an 8×8 raised bed of these beauties this year:
We’d hoped to fill the 8×8 with about 40 plants, but after seeing the $3 per plant price tag, we settled for just 10 for this year. Hopefully, they will spread and we’ll have a more abundant harvest in the years to come, since strawberries come back each year.
For now we’re fighting over each one of these juicy sweet prizes. =)
How about YOU are you gardening this year? What’s in growing in your garden?
Here are a few more gardening posts that you might want to check out:
I just finished putting in 7 different varieties of tomatoes (Jack’s favorite food!), 2 cucumbers, 2 peppers, zucchini, orange mint, eggplant, kale, lettuce and Brussels sprouts. And of course there’s always our raspberry bushes. Wishing we had a bigger gardening space for more! Now onto to plant the flowers!
We have Oregano, Cilantro, Basil, Bell and Jalapeno Peppers, Broccoli, Zucchini and Yellow Squash, and Cucumbers. I’m hoping it’s not too late to plant some green beans.
We just planted ours yesterday. (i always wear my grandpa’s old overalls that I cut-off into shorts to commemorate the occasion!!) It is one of my favorite days of the year. We start plants inside in March. The kids love helping with this project. I like your idea of adding herbs!! You’ll be surprised at how quickly the strawberries spread. It’s pretty fun to watch them branch-out. Now, I just need to learn to can so none of our hard gardening work is wasted!!!