Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners Host Square Foot Gardening Symposium

28 Newly Certified Square Foot Gardening Instructors (photo courtesy of Betty Bianconi)

Many of us love to garden and love fresh vegetables, but don't have the space to grow a traditional row garden.  Or maybe we have the space, but our soil is bad and nothing ever seems to grow in it.  Maybe it's rocky, or sandy, or nothing but clay and never drains.  Or maybe you're sick of dealing with weeds and are looking for a way to get keep them down.  Gardeners in such situations might have success using the Square Foot Gardening method.

This past weekend, the Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners hosted a 3-day Square Foot Gardening (SFG) symposium, where interested gardeners learned the benefits of this gardening method and how to build and manage these types of gardens.  I was very proud of our Master Gardeners for all the hard work they put into organizing and hosting this training.  We were surprised and honored to have attendees from not only Halifax County and other parts of the state, but from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Illinois and Missouri as well.  I want to offer special thank yous to Master Gardener Betty Bianconi, who first had the idea of hosting the symposium and did all the legwork of arranging the symposium through the Square Foot Gardening Foundation, and to the Master Gardeners who helped plan, cook, and clean for this successful three-day event.  

Our symposium instructor and Square Foot Gardening Foundation CEO Victoria Boudman (center), her daughter Grace (left), and Master Gardener Betty Bianconi (right)

Getting started

The square foot garden method, developed by author and engineer Mel Bartholomew, is based on gardening in raised bed squares rather than rows in order to cut down on the space required to garden and eliminate the need for digging.  The basic square foot garden design is a 4 foot by 4 foot box, with a depth of 6 inches.  A grid separates the box into 16  one-foot by one-foot squares.  Within each square, you plant your vegetables.

Laying the grid

Depending on the type of vegetable you plant in each square, you may plant 1, 4, 9 or 16 of that particular plant.  For plants that grow to a large size, such as tomatoes, you'd only plant 1 per square (anymore than 1 and the plants wouldn't have enough room to grow), but for very small plants such as carrots, you'd plant 16 per square.  The beds are filled with a modified potting mix composed of 1/3 blended compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 coarse vermiculite, referred to in SFG literature as Mel's Mix.  Gardens can be built in a variety of sizes, but never wider then four feet to allow the garden to be accessible from all sides.

Victoria, Karen, and Wayne hang the trellis

Karen planting the last few onion bulbs

During the symposium, we built and planted a 4' x 4' square at the Halifax Agricultural Center.  The box that we planted during the symposium has cool season vegetables in, including garden peas, onions, broccoli, swiss chard, and leaf lettuce.  Some of these were planted a bit later than optimal, but we hope to be able to harvest them before the warm weather completely takes over.  In terms of planting arrangement, we set the broccoli in the four center squares, because it will ultimately be the largest of all the items planted, and we put garden peas along the back row so that they can climb the trellis.  The trellis was placed along the North side of the bed so it won't shade the remainder of the garden.  The remaining plants were set in the outside squares.  The broccoli and lettuce were planted by transplants, all others were seeded.

Our Master Gardeners have been working for over a year to recover what was formerly called the memorial garden and develop it into a demonstration garden.  We hope to use this demonstration garden to expose gardeners to new types of plants and planting systems that they can use at home.  We decided to tie the first phase of planting the garden into the SFG symposium and we will do additional square foot boxes in the coming weeks.  Our plan for this section is to grow a variety of different vegetables, both cool season and warm season, and also experiment with different soil mixes within the boxes.  I'm interested to see how Mel's Mix compares to other potting mixes or even straight compost in terms of plant performance.  Once the square foot section is established, we'll begin on our herb garden and our shade garden.  Additional sections will be added to the garden in following years.

Our new square foot garden and the Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners who helped plant it (photo by Betty Bianconi)

Check back as I'll be posting updates every few weeks, both of the square foot gardens specifically and the demonstration garden as a whole as it begins to take shape.