When the Engineer Gardens
Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
As with every spring, the rains fall, the sun shines, and I remain hopelessly inept as a gardener. Or, maybe, "inept" isn't quite the right word. "Lazy" and "impatient". There, that's the ticket. So, despite fantasizing repeatedly about the wonderful life we would lead if only we got around to putting in some vegetables this year, my husband and I have never gotten around to putting in some vegetables. At best, we keep the lawn mowed and free of vehicles on blocks.
But that may be changing because, last week, Baker brought home a copy of The All New Square Foot Gardening guide, a book written by a retired engineer, which manages to make home veggie patches appealing to both my laissez-faire approach to plant life, and Baker's (who is, himself, an engineer) tendencies towards efficiency-obsession and Maker glee. The book promises to help you grow more, in less space, with less work. OK, I'm game.
The basic idea is that most people try to garden like they're making a miniature farmstead---with wide rows, hills and furrows, plowed into the earth of your backyard. And, frankly, all that adds up to a pain in the ass. Tilling sucks. Your dirt probably isn't ideal for growing things. You get weeds that need to be dealt with every day. The watering process wastes water and usually ends up with some plants drowning and other plants parched. And all you want is a freakin' salad.
Square-foot gardening, on the other hand, is all about eliminating those problems. Instead of tilling the dirt and pumping in fertilizer, you build a big box, put a liner on the bottom, and fill it with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Great soil. And no weed seeds to sprout up.Because you make the box small enough to reach everything without stepping in the dirt, your soil stays aerated. Because you don't have to weed, you can grow plants from fewer seeds, closer together, with each box broken down into neat, anal-retentive grids. The idea of a garden that can be plotted out on graph paper is already making Baker salivate.
The watering solution is particularly slick. Instead of moving around a sprayer that never seems to successfully dampen the full area you've aimed it at (and chucks water onto places that don't need it), you hook up a pipe system to your box and screw in the hose. Plant stuff than needs lots of water closer to the pipe, and stuff that needs less further away. Then you can turn the water on (at a lower pressure than you'd use for spraying) and let it trickle down.
I'll be honest, as the wife of an engineer, I end up poking a lot of fun at the hyper-planning, "let us sit down and work out the numbers before we toast that bread" mindset. But it's all in fun. I promise. You engineers can be as detail-oriented as you want to be, as long as you keep offering up great solutions like this.
Image of a nicely gridded-up square foot garden courtesy shygantic, via a Creative Commons license.
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Ironically, ever since i became an engineer I haven't hardly constructed anything. Why? Because now i refuse to start on a project if i dont have all the parts. It used to be i'd get the ball rolling and fill in the gaps later, but now it just drives me nuts.
As an engineer, my definition of low maintenance is a bit lower. I leave a few tomatoes and other veggies at the end of the season. Voila! A new crop the next year. No planting. Maybe water if it's a drought. And so on.
Nature does a pretty good job!
how is this any different than the classic planter box? I love the idea but isnt this just a slightly modified planter box. I have two of them in my yard right now.
Pro tip (straight from a permaculture guy I know): buy the 1st edition of the book used, as it's even more straightforward -- the All New edition suffers from second-system syndrome.
My family uses this exact system, and it works great. Cheers!
Use drip irrigation. It's much more efficient at getting the water to the roots of the plants -where it's needed most- is less wasteful, and is better for the plants in that it reduces fungal infections and other diseases. Then the only thing you have to worry about is insects and other garden pests getting to your salad before you do.
My wife bought me his first book after seeing him interviewed on TV. Gotta say, it works like a champ!!! Been using the square foot method for 6 or 7 yrs and our 4x4 garden produces more veggies than our 3 person family can eat.
Looking forward to getting the updated version - Thanks!!!
Looks like I'm going to have to break down and make one of these things if I want to grow my garden. It always looked like more trouble than it was worth, but I have a good spot for it, and can reroute the gray water from my washing machine out for irrigation.
Real Engineers garden hydroponically...
My household just built a small urban garden for the first time last summer. We built a raised bed garden using the wood frame from old water bed a friend was throwing away. We lined the bottom with recycled newspaper and filled it with a mix of topsoil and compost. It was very easy to keep weeded and to plant. Our one mistake was in over planting the box, our tomatoes and tomatillos grew like crazy and then started to fall over taking up half of our 3ft by 8ft area. This year we are going to be moving our tomatoes to free standing patio baskets so as to not crowd and over shade the rest of the plants. We will also be planting most of our herbs in planters so that they can continue to grow once our short Midwest season is done.
1. Does anyone know if the book talks about starting from seeds? Because (a) the site is boingboinged, and (b) my seeds sprouted to about 2 inches high, and then they all died except for the beans.
2. A liner wouldn't work on my land. We have two really pesky weeds. One of them is a thing with a tuber-like root whose leaves have thorns on them, making them painful to pull out, and another of them is a vine with small leaves and a root system that seems to form a global vine internet. These things get through everything. I need the kind of liner used in nuclear waste dumps.
i just built one of these a month or so ago stuff is sprouting now and im pretty excited to grow some vegetables on my roof in brooklyn.
@The80Y: Tomatoes are generally so productive, that I've heard that you only need SIX plants to feed an entire family for the entire season.
The man is married to a woman who wrote a book called "Be Amazing." Much slack must be cut for him.
My solution is berry bushes, fruit trees, and going after the edible weeds -- in other words, closer to foraging than gardening. A bit of pruning once a year, dump some fertilizer on the roots about that often, and they look after themselves.
Boing Boing now covers gardening? I think ye cover all my favorite things in life now.
These gardens are a slippery slope into permaculture and homesteading. Enjoy the slide!
While square foot gardening is nice, I am partial to the "Earthtainer", which doesn't require tilling up the yard, building a raised bed, and is suitable for patio/terrace/balcony gardening. It is a DIY knockoff of the Earthbox(TM). There is a fair bit of engineering involved in the build. I just built a set of 4 dual tub DIY self-watering (sub-irrigation) planters that are being ganged to a float valve box with drip irrigation tubing. The designs are supposed to be excellent for tomatoes, and for the lazy, one couldn't do better than adding in a float valve for true self-watering. Links:
http://grow.lot-o-nothin.com/self-watering-container-instructions
http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com/
Regarding irrigation, I went through three or four battery powered water times that screw on to the hose bib. They all ended up breaking due to water seeping into the housing from the valve. These were $40 valves that broke in a day or two.
My fix? I bought a 4 zone irrigation timer (like for a "real" sprinkler system), solenoid valves with 3/4 NPT threads, and used garden hoses connected to them with plenty of teflon pipe tape. My system has worked flawlessly for almost a year.
The actual sprinkler system is made by DIG and they sell a kit for about $20 which comes with 50' of 1/2" black tube and about a dozen different sprayers. You can go ala carte but for $20, you get the entire system and can add more sprayers/drippers as needed. When you figure in the cost of the materials included it's a great value.
I would feel a strong compulsion to break it down into hexes rather than a grid.
That, or eliminate any form of structure entirely, and just plant everything at random.
I've considered doing similar with a metal trough and a soaker hose.
Most Greenhouses take care of a situation that even the illustration here ignores. Can you guess what it is?
The veggies are on the ground.
Guess what. If it is growing in a box, the box does not NEED to be on the ground where you have to crawl around getting the knees of your pants dirty. Unless that is what you like about gardening.
Put the box on a table where you can tend to it while standing. Weeds will still want to appear. Attach a soaker hose to a daily timer for regular watering.
I have had a much less positive experience with the "square foot" methods. In general the productivity is very dependent on the quality of the compost. If the compost is of poor quality the soil can end up being devoid of nutrients and if it is not fully composted it will suck up all of the nitrogen in the soil as it finishes up.
My sister put in a "square foot" garden a few years ago and had terrible results, I tested her soil and found it completely lacking of nitrogen and phosphate and highly deficient in potassium.
My mother also put in a square foot box and had poor results. In the heat of the summer the "soil" simply cannot hold enough moisture to support the plants. If you water aggressively the soil leaches nutrients and the plants still end up dreadfully stressed. Mulching helps ameliorate some of this problem, but it is usually not enough.
I believe that the problem with square foot is that the medium is lacking in the clays that constitute a good loam. Clays are essential to holding water and bind many of nutrient ions the plants need (NH4, NO3, PO4, K, Fe, Ca). Without the clays the soil highly prone to leaching (especially if you have to water more) and difficult to maintain. Excessive amounts of clay are certainly problematic, but to completely eliminate them harms to viability of the soil.
Square foot gardening works great, just be forewarned that some of spacing advice in the book is optimistic as #10 points out. You may need to give big veggies like tomatoes and zucchini a little more room. Other than that minor point (most back of the seed packet spacing advice is too generous), the book is a classic and full of great advice.
And as #17 says, Earthtainers also work well, particularly for people who don't have land and must garden on a balcony or patio.
There used to be a TV series called 'Square Foot Gardening'. I think it was on PBS in the days before cable.
Phoenicks
When I got him, my husband came with "The Integral Urban House" and several other great homesteading books that are like some kind of ridiculous, permaculture porn. We have never done anything with them but flip through and dream.
A couple of random replies:
OP: Where did you see that Mel Bartholomew advocated any kind of fancy watering system? I have the same book, and while it's not here in front of me, I am pretty sure he says to just have a bucket of water set out (preferably a rain barrel catching the rain, but do with what you have) and just water each square once a day with about a cup of water. The vermiculite/peat moss/compost mix is supposed to hold water particularly well, so it releases as needed.
@3: This is essentially a raised bed system with a particular kind of medium for planting. You could do it in planter boxes; in fact we are working on implementing something similar using containers rather than building our own boxes (although we might do that too).
@11: Yes, he does talk about starting from seeds. You can do that, or with this system you can just plant a pinch of seeds, properly spaced, in each spot and just cut the ones you don't want when they sprout. Also, instead of using a liner you might just put a plywood bottom in the bottom of your box, since contact with your existing soil isn't necessary. If your weed comes up through that, time to move.
It also takes the engineer's POV of eliminating as much nature as possible. Fine if all you want is the maters, but if you're hoping to grok nature you'd be missing the worms, nematodes, fungi, etc., that cultivating in the actual ground provides.
I've seen square foot gardening done many a time (I have the old book, and I've done it myself) but for some reason nobody I know has ever bothered with the whole raised bed thing.
We just grow plants in tight formation, basically, to cut down on weeding, tilling, use of space, etc.
Of course we have so many slugs we have to put down a good coat of diatomaceous earth every now and then, and I use bordeaux mixture and dried blood to scare off the deer.
My dad is really into square foot container gardening. I have made many gentle suggestions about jackhammering the cement patio and communing directly with the soil beneath but we reached that point in our relationship many years ago where we just agree to disagree.
Anyway, I have really crappy vegetable yields from my own earth based garden. The veggies I do get are pretty well covered in bugs. The thing is, that is the only place where bugs in the garden are a bad thing. On the milkweed, the lantana, and the salvias, the bugs are all an integral part of the little habitat.
It is wonderful and amazing to see Michelle Obama, my dad and many others put some vegetables in the ground (or in the plastic tub, as the case may be.) But I'd also like to see the native plant/ wildlife garden/ backyard habitat meme get some traction too.
I will say, if you are planning to dump a bunch of fertilizer and pesticides on your plants... maybe try another hobby? "Gardener" shouldn't be synonymous with water polluter- but it kind of is.
Been using this technique for a couple of decades - since Mel Barthalamew published the first version and before he was on PBS. It combines planter box and truck farm concepts; high yield in minimum space. Our new beds are recycled faux wood material in hexagons. Good quality growing medium makes all the difference in yields. No vermiculite because it breaks down too quickly, just lots of compost and organic fertilizers. We freeform mixed plantings of flower and veggies. The basic idea is to plant small bunches and as they finish their yield replace them with something else, alternating annual flowers and veggies. Sturdy support is necessary for tomatoes that produce 20-30 lbs per plant. Most any kind of container would work, even an old hot tub given away on Craigslist with adequate drainage holes punched into it. Our climate makes irrigation necessary for maximum yield. Dig timers are among the better units. Gardening's great physical and mental therapy and it will give you the healthiest and tastiest fresh veggies.
We only water in the garden because our front yard is filled with native plants and other drought tolerant species.
There's a great video tutorial Introducing Square Foot Gardening here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6237463360761955560
The uber-gardeneer might consider Earthboxes as a superior engineering solution to the problem of how to grow food with the least effort and trouble:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXhVvtu5Rw
Thanks for posting this Maggie! I've been planning what kind of greenhouse I'm going to buy and was considering raised garden beds for when I buy my first house (hopefully this year). The order of this raised garden appeals to my borderline obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
@28 wolfiesma
I have personal experience with a native plant/ wildlife garden/ backyard habitat in my current rented residence. The landlord (my partner's dad) redid the whole landscaping, turning the large yard of lovely flat grass into a jungle of native plants, box hedges (which take 5 hours to trim!), and roses. While it may look pretty, there is no room for a garden even though the section is large. Personally I prefer flat grass with some selected productive plants.
Hey Kiwi, Luckily there is room on God's green earth for the both of us. :) You say tomato, I say... butterfly garden! Cheers.
Hi Wolfiesma, as long as you don't come asking for tomatoes after you've finished munching your way through your butterflies! :)
It's not really that aesthetically pleasing though, is it? I know a couple of gardeners who gladly struggle with tilling their own soil, simply because they would baulk at anything so, well, industrial-looking turning up in their garden.
Still, if I had a garden, I'd try it out. Each to their own I guess.
#8: Be careful. The usual recommendation I've seen is not to use grey water for irrigating edibles, just flowers/lawns. Too much chance of someone forgetting and dumping something relatively noxious down the sink.
Maggie -- Minneapolis has the largest plant sale in the country on Mother's Day weekend: http://www.friendsschoolplantsale.com/
My advice is to grow something different and trade neighbors for the more common (and space consuming) tomatoes & zukes.
I wanna try popcorn & peanuts this year. My four-year old can't wait!
@34 by dd528
I think there's a fair amount of personal opinion regarding what is aesthetically pleasing. Personally I find raised beds more aesthetically pleasing that a flat expanse of garden. There's something about modularity that appeals to me :)
You don't eat the butterflies. The birds do. You trap the birds and make a pot pie... 4 and 20 black birds anyone? Anyone...
We have butterfly storms occasionally. Millions and millions of monarchs streaming by in brilliant clouds for a few hours.
That's some good shit.
Why build boxes?
Just buy a bag of good compost. Cut a few small holes at the bottom and a large hole at the top. Seed and presto.
For deep rooting plants or large plants like beans and tomatoes, place the bag vertically, for lettuce or herbs, place the bag horizontal.
At the end of the season, throw away the bag at the recycling plant of your community.
Even works on small balconies in inner cities. Nothing like a fresh, hand-picked, stemm-riped tomato with some fresh basil.
Is nobody else going to say it? Please don't use peat-moss. A real peat bog is a beautiful, crazy place, where the ground ripples and bounces below your feet. Peat extraction means draining the bog and killing everything that lives on it. It takes much longer for a bog to grow than it takes to drain and cut it. It's really not sustainable.
Forgot to add... if you put in cover crops (clover, buckwheat, etc.) in late summer as your crop plants finish up, and then add a lot of mulch in the fall, you won't usually have to till the beds again in the spring (or maybe just a bit with a fork).
@41 Anon:
That is a crazy idea and I am going to try it.
I think you could do alot better than garden out of a plastic bag. An old tire, a bathtub, anything really. Truck bed, ceramic urn... when all else fails, oh, I don't know.... the ground? :) Roof garden would be amazing, too. Never tried that.
Thanks, Technogeek, but I should be ok with the graywater. I can run the drain hose from the washing machine straight out a precut hole and either directly into the chosen area, or a catchment for later use. Nothing else would go there but the washing machine dump. Since I've switched over to the "environmentally friendly" Costco laundry soap, there should be little if any bad stuff in the graywater. Maybe a little lint for mulch :)
Wolfiesma, the idea here is efficiency of resources. If all you have is a concrete patio that butts right up against your neighbor's apartment but you still want to grow arugula, you're going to have to improvise. It's also probably the cheapest, fastest solution to no-space gardening. It might lack elegance, but if it works, great!
Just don't use graywater on shade plants. Graywater tends to be alkaline and shade plants tend to be acid-loving.
I would love to irrigate my plants with a graywater system. We send a bathtub full of water down the drain everyday when it could be used to make the banana trees grow tall, you know? Would it be as easy as taking some medical tubing and making a reverse vacuum siphon thing to pump the water out the window? Its a privacy window that doesn't actually open, so I guess I'd also have to drill a tube-sized hole in the glass...
if you're hoping to grok nature you'd be missing the worms, nematodes, fungi, etc., that cultivating in the actual ground provides.
And yet, there was a worm in my second-floor shower today. Nature manages.
That's one thing that concerns me about drilling a hole to the outside. The worms could get in that way. I guess I'd have to make a little cover for when the tubing wasn't hanging out the window. I love bugs in the garden, but not so much in the bathtub... or the bed.
this article is a big help, and awesome news, also a great way to help out any elderly who would otherwise not be able to garden. i was surprised this didnt get more traction....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7432972.stm
really cool lesotho garden food idea...
Salad-growers complaining about poor yield: remember you need to dump a whole new batch of compost in there for the second crop of lettuce. Lettuce uses up the soil really fast. Not so with weedy plants like chard, but chard gets all full of slugs and other crawlers, and is hard to kill!
My wife is an avid SFG-er, and she's been using the old book (companion to the old PBS series) for years. It's a great method. She's also an engineer, for what it's worth.
Wolfiesma, the surgical tubing can be caulked in place; most tub caulk can be peeled off with a bit of effort, but still provide a weather resistant seal. About the bugs: cover the end of the tube (exterior) with a bit of screening, or maybe a recycled kneehigh panty hose, held in place with a twist tie. Graywater out, no bugs in!
I suggest a healthy dose of Masanobu Fukuoka. Basically, you're not lazy enough yet.
Rick
ML, Thanks! I'm going to try that!
This is pretty much the way we garden. I guess I'm not surprised to see someone else had our same idea.
FYI you can also get an insert for the AeroGrow that will start your plants indoors in dirt-sponges and includes instructions on getting them ready for growing outdoors. So you can plant before the frosts end and get a better crop out of your square footage.
Also, I recommend Osmocote smart-release plant food for fertilizer. They're little beads that are time-release so that you don't over-fertilize. When transplanting, throw some of the beads in below the plant before putting the plant in. The plant will take root better as it reaches for the little fertilizer beads.
I am verrrrry curious about that AeroGrow contraption. Have been seeing them around town for some time. I read on the Brite Ideas website last night (while looking for a link to the AeroGrow) that said something about growing seeds...
Raised-bed gardens, as in the photo, are more productive, easier to use, require no tilling or digging (because you do not walk on the soil and compact it), enable you to replace exhausted/rocky/clay soil with something better, and much more.
My husband Dan Barker gave away 1400 raised-bed vegetable gardens in the Portland OR area, building them at the homes of the elderly, poor, and handicapped (and some group homes, hospices, schools, shelters, etc.). The gardens came with seeds and starts the first 2 years. They belonged to the gardeners. Portland has a good community garden program but lots of people lack the energy or transportation to commute to their garden. This is for them---but really for anyone! Dan started a nonprofit, raised the money, did the work.
You could do this in your town, on any scale---building a few or a lot. Build one for yourself and one for someone who can't do it for themselves!
See his site
http://www.jeffnet.org/~hgpf/
for plans, how-to's, history, inspiration, pictures of gardens and gardeners.
Since retiring from active building he has helped other people get started across the country---sorry, no grants---fundraising has been really hard! But those seeking grants locally can point to the success of Dan's organization, The Home Gardening Project
Foundation (HGPF), as evidence that this works.
A program that started on his model and has added other elements is GRUB, in Olympia WA:
their site is http://www.goodgrub.org/index.php/page/show/home
Flint Michigan also started a neighborhood program modelled on HGPF which used mostly block gardens, since they have a lot of empty lots there in FLint, and saw great rewards in neighborhoods coming together.
Raising some of your own food makes sense economically, environmentally, psychologically; it gets people out of the house, teaches kids and rewards them for responsibility, gives people crops to share with neighbors or food banks, promotes neighborhood harmony...
You can make "real change in the real world"!
Square foot garden = awesome. We grow all of or vegetables and greens using this method.
We started our raised beds with free scrap lengths of log siding from a log house business. It's easy to expand too.
I really must add to the previous post #42 regarding peat. There is no need to use peat anything! Compost is what you need - it's free, easy to make and is environment friendly.
Intensive gardening techniques are very popular these days, but they have a lot of drawbacks too. Since the plants are crowded, they will be stealing water and nutrients from each other, and will need to be watered more frequently. If you are in a drought-prone area, then they will really suffer and grow poorly. Some vegetable plants want to have pretty deep and/or broad root systems, and crowding them will severely limit how they grow.
Ultimately, extensive gardening (i.e. "wide rows, hills and furrows") may be more productive per square foot of garden. And weeds? That is what a hoe is for.
A good book on this is "Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times" by Steve Solomon.
Even lower maintenance: permaculture. Plan and research the heck out of something, then prep the living heck out of the soil and plant three or five permanent things. And they solve each others' problems permanently. Example: Cardoon for tasty leaves and fertile mulch, blueberries to take advantage of the increasingly alkaline soil and grow tall with clover for nitrogen fixation and groundcover to smother weeds. Low or no maintenance, low watering, low or no weeding, and it should last a couple of decades. Plant these babies downslope of a pit of wood chips at which you aim your morning showerhead (water too cold for your shower? Not for your garden!) and innoculate with mushroom spawn. Then you don't need to water, and have blueberries, mushrooms, cardoon, and clover root tea for as long as you please with low or (YES!)no maintenance.
wow, my site got linked, nice.
I LOVE container gardening. I make my own self watering containers. They yields this year are great, but I have a few ideas for improving next year by far (I'm not telling yet).
#52, soil can take multiple crops of lettuce if you fertilize properly and make sure the soil is not overly compacted from the previous crop.
While containers, self watering and even sqft gardening is cool, vertical gardening is even cooler. I have 24 strawberry plants in less than 2 sqft of ground space. Try that in a sqft garden :)