The things that I love about Square Foot Gardening are:
- since you are planting in a square & presumably remember roughly WHERE you planted it - then anything else is a weed. VERY cool for me!
- I love the idea of the netting & vertical gardening. Can't wait to see what all my nets look like full of melons & tomatoes (yep - I'm an optimist!)
- My old beds have 1 type of soil (rose soil), then some of my new beds have mostly rose soil & some Mel's Mix Soil & my last 5 beds have 100% Mel's Mix. It's interesting to see & feel the difference. I LOVE the Mel's Mix & I suspect that will be our soil of choice in the future.
- I like how each bed is it's own experiment. I can plant the same things in different beds, in different sides of the yard & see what, if any, differences there are.
- Lastly I can easily see how easy it will be to pull up one thing & replace it with another & not have to wait until the whole bed is ready. I could have done it before - just never thought about it.
DRIP LINES
We are big on using drip lines. Currently Houston is in the midst of a drought. I know that using my drippers will allow me to water my garden with LOTS less gallons than had I done it by hand. Also the water gets right to the base of the plant, which is better too.
I found a really good place online for drip lines & assorted drip stuff. They sell drip "spaghetti" lines that already have the drippers with predetermined spacing. 12" or 6" apart. We got the 12" & can see (NOW) that we'd have been better off getting the 6" apart one. So, this weekend we'll add more drip line to compensate. But, doing it from scratch - get the 6".
Something else we decided to do is to put shut off valves on each bed. That way when we are changing out the plants, or there is nothing there, etc. we don't have to water that particular bed.
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| I just twist the green knob & I can control the water to each bed. |
NETTING
Because of my reading I was able to get lots of ideas from several different sources. I don't always remember where I read what, when I do I will give credit. This book has a lot of good information & I know that his beds have interchangible stuff.
And it's important to us to be able to easily change out aspects of the beds without major work. As much as possible we try to think first, thus making less work later on. But, as in most things, there are a few ideas that pop up later. Here is how we did our "tinker toy" netting.
We got 10' electrical conduit at Home Depot. They are hollow & bendable, with a tool you get there too, you'll also need a cutter for them. Then DH cuts each pole into two 5' lengths. He then takes another pole & cuts it to the length he needs. He'll then bend each end of that pole, & he uses this for the top of the structure. We use connectors that you also get at Home Depot to connect them, just a few twists of a screwdriver & you're done!
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| This show the connector... ok not a great pic |
To connect these to the garden beds he creates several 5" lengths of the conduit, then using metal brackets, yep from Home Depot, he screws these into the bed. This picture shows you what it looks like. Attach another connector & this neatly allows you to connect the netting poles to the bed. How cool is that!
Now we can take the netting structure on & off easily!
To connect the netting to the poles we got small plastic tie wraps, put that through the pole & netting, pull tight & snip off! There's a neat tool for that too.
We made each of our nets 4' wide so they are going to be interchangeable. We got the netting from Burpee. Hopefully it will last a few years.
