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Welcome to my first Square Foot Garden! This is the first spring I've had a yard to garden
in. Over the winter, I listed out all the veggies I wanted to grow, and finally had to cut the list in half
several times because I didn't want to dig up so much sod in my backyard. Just in the nick of time, I found
Mel Bartholomew's book on Square Foot Gardening at the bookstore in February. I was really excited about his method,
and found that my space could grow just about everything I wanted.
Here was my plan for my spring garden. After the first heavy rain in March, I realized I needed to build a trench along the south and west sides of my plot for drainage. I managed to fit the following in my 7'X15' area:
4 brocolli plants
3 sq feet of spinach
9 head lettuce
48 carrots (in 3 sq feet spots)
2 leaf lettuce plots
3 potatoe plants
2 pepper plants
5 sq foot row of pole beans
5 sq foot row of sugar snap peas
5 sq foot row of asparagus
9 corn plants
2 tomatoe plants
3 eggplants
5 okra plants
I'm not exactly sure what all will grow in Central Oklahoma so I'm just experimenting this year!
Here's my area in February, 2000
Here's April 24, 2000
May 6, 2000
Okra and Kentucky blue pole beans are the only seeds that haven't emerged yet. The brocolli is growing like wild, but still don't have any brocolli spears. The weather's warming up pretty good here, so I may be out of luck. My sugar snap peas are growing slowly but surely. They are beginning to climb up their supports, but no sign of flowers. I may have planted the broc and peas too late for Oklahoma's climate.
May 15, 2000. Brocolli HUGE, still no spears...
May 15,2000. Peas in bloom!
May 30, 2000. Finally brocolli.
May 30,2000. Corn tassles showing, little cucumbers,
tomatoes, and 2 pickings of peas.
The white showing along the ground is wet newspaper
covered in compost. I read this works good for
controlling weeds. We'll see.
I dug the brocolli up on June 11 and planted summer squash in its place. I also pulled the peas up and planted mini pumpkins to run up the trellis.
June 11, 2000:
The corn is now over 8 feet tall! I should have gotten a smaller variety. The tomatoes, eggplant, and pepper are really suffering from all the shade from the corn. Hopefully, the corn will be ready to harvest in a couple of weeks, and I can pull it all out. We did get to harvest our first eggplant on June 23rd. We have eaten eggplant parmigan 3 nights in a row now from it.
This is a picture of Wendy and one of her gladioulus from her flowerbed. I've also harvested about 15 carrots. They've been pretty puny. They were Nantes variety. They are long past the reccomended harvest date, but they only got to be about 5 inches long. The newspaper/compost has worked great. The weeds have been almost non-existent since I put it down over a month ago.
July 7, 2000. Corn is still suffocating the eggplant, pepper, and one of the tomato plants. After pulling a few ears and finding terrible results -- worms, lots of un- pollinated sections, etc-- I went ahead and removed all the corn from the garden. Out of 9 plants and about 16 ears, only 2 were worth keeping to eat.
July 15, 2000: The okra is becoming the healthiest veggie in the garden now that we've become hot and dry.