Building a Square Foot Garden
Inspired by the success of my Aerogardens and Spring’s approach, I took on a weekend project recently and built a raised fruit and vegetable garden on top of an area of our lawn. I’ve got some butter crunch lettuce, onions (spaced tightly in 2 squares for green onions and wider in 4 squares for full maturity), arugula and rosemary planted so far. I may have overdone the onions, but oh well. When the danger of frost has passed, we look forward to planting tomatoes, hot peppers, bell peppers and strawberries in the remaining spaces.
I have heard a lot of buzz recently about Square Foot Gardening, a method which purports to offer a lot of yield in a small space. More info about that here. It’s an easy and especially effective method for raised bed gardening. It’s nothing new, but a lot of people seem to be using it and having good results.
The idea for building a raised bed in the first place was born out of a vague notion to have some kind of garden in my back yard. I wasn’t sure what that would be at first. I thought I could just dig up the grass near the house foundation, mix in some topsoil and start planting. Luckily I did some more research before that and discovered that raised beds are much easier to care for, have better drainage and generally better soil quality than in-ground gardens. Given my lack of experience, a raised bed seemed like a far safer start to my outdoor gardening adventures.
My wife found a post on The Pioneer Woman about how to build such a thing. I liked the way she described the process and it seemed easy enough. Actually, it was. Getting the soil mixture carted from the store to the house was harder than actually building the garden frame.
Just finished the building, laying down some initial compost
I modified my plan a bit from hers. My 4×8 rasied bed uses a single layer of 4 2×8 boards rather than 2 layers of 8 2×6 boards. I ended up buying 3 8-foot lengths of 2×8 Weathershield (Home Depot) treated lumber and having one of the boards cut in half to make two 4-foot length. I also used mason line and a staple gun to mark out 1′ x 1′ squares across the garden.
Marking the Square Feet
Using treated lumber for a food garden has caused some debate. Apparently the older types of treated lumber used arsenic and chemicals to treat the wood. I read up on this particular brand of lumber and decided it was OK to use because it’s using the newer and safer methods that do not contain arsenic.
You can also use pine boards but they will only last a few years and then rot. Natural cedar or redwood is usually the preferred wood to contain a garden for growing food. They are also among the most expensive and hard-to-find woods.
In the end, I used:
- 3 pieces 8-foot 2×8 lumber (one piece cut in half)
- 18″ wooden stakes (might have been good to use shorter stakes, I had to cut some of them down)
- Hammer
- Level
- Pencil
- Measuring tape
- Mason line (outdoor twine, for the square foot markings)
- Staple gun (to staple down the mason line across the tops of the boards)
- Carpenter’s square
- Power drill/driver with a phillips head and a 7/64 #8 counter sink bit (which I lost a critical part of in the grass, immediately after the project)
- 2″ and 3.5″ exterior screws (actually I used 2.5″ for the smaller screws, which were too long, so use 2″ ones)
- Lots of garden soil, peat moss and compost
I won’t re-write The Pioneer Woman’s tutorial, but I more or less followed it exactly and it worked well. All except for the stakes. I wish I had bought shorter stakes (hard ground) and smaller screws for attaching the sides of the bed to the stakes (I split many of the stakes with my large 2.5″ screws.)
If you are thinking about starting a new outdoor garden, I highly recommend trying out a square-foot garden. It’s easy and fun. I will be sure to report how the veggies are doing and look forward to planting fruits and peppers in about a month.
