Jared's Reviews > All New Square Foot Gardening

Mel Bartholomew is a huge advocate of box gardening. Box gardening is a great idea, especially when you have alkaline clay like we have in our backyard. Constructing the boxes is a snap -- okay, more like a whine, because it takes a drill. He doesn't emphasize enough, though, that the gardens take a huge amount of water, because the wood seems to wick the water away from the dirt.

Stuff seems to grow well in Mel's Mix, if you plant it in the right part of the season. Last year we planted quite late, so our harvest was pretty meager. This year, all of our varieties of lettuce are already huge, our asparagus is coming up, our strawberries are going wild, and our carrots seem to be doing well. For some reason, though, tomatoes seem to just as well in the clay, if not better. So we're doing an experiment: planting tomatoes in boxes and out of boxes to see which are better.

The square-foot part of the idea seems to work for some things, but it's not as helpful for others. I find his emphasis on the idea a little funny. For things that can be planted in a single square, they're great. But last year our tomatoes plants got so big that they overflowed into other squares, choking out the plants that were in them. And, I'm sorry, but strawberries were meant to take over a whole box. There's just no point in dividing the plants up.

The book is very conversational. Some of the concepts could use better diagrams, like the greenhouse idea. And he mentions that each box will last for several years, but he doesn't give any ideas about how to move the dirt when you have to take one apart. And his idea of putting chicken wire on the bottom of the box to keep critters out is great -- but we've learned that you have to use maybe quarter inch chicken wire, because small rodents like voles can get through the one inch. And the edges of the wire tear up the weed fabric, so we have weeds around the edges of the boxes.

Thankfully, though, the garden boxes themselves are really easy to weed, because the dirt doesn't get compacted from being walked on, like you get with a normal garden. Overall, I'm glad we're using this approach, because the results we got the first year trying to plant directly in our clay (with some topsoil thrown on top) was rather sad -- except for the tomatoes.