Square Foot Gardening

We went to the Home & Garden Show today, and attended a couple of the speakers. The most informative was Mel Bartholomew, author of Square Foot Gardening.

His ideas challenged my traditional farm gardening views. But, it turns out we've already been practicing some adaptations of his basic philosophy in our backyard. Before the seminar ended, I was already sketching ideas for more raised beds that would fit out "landscaping" and give us more flexibility in veggie/ herb/ edible flower gardening.

Mr. Bartholomew is not a trained horticulturalist. By profession, he is a civil engineer and efficiency expert. After a successful career, he retired at 42 years old and got involved at the start of his community's garden. He realized that growing things in rows was not an efficient use of space. Applying his professional knowledge to gardening, he developed this system for efficient use of space, water, soil, and crop rotation.

In the early 80's, he wrote his original book, but in recent years, he has come out of second retirement to revise and add to his book. In an effort to eliminate world hunger, the he has founded a non-profit that goes into Third World countries and teaches this type of small space gardening to schools, orphanages, shelters, correctional facilities, elderly, wheelchair bound, missionaries, and people groups in many parts of the world.

We've ordered a copy of his book, and we're trying to get ahold of a DVD. (If we get one, we might host a gathering, or interested people can borrow it from us).

Also, last night we found parts of some of his older PBS shows, and short introductory videos on YouTube. Here's a variation of the plain square foot garden for a focal point garden (the qualitu/ adio is poor- probably taken from an old video tape or tape of Tv). Other people have made their own video version based on his ideas- expert village has a whole series of short videos on YouTube. Here's a series of Mel's work done in association with Health Foundation- video 1,2,3
(it gives many of the basics). There's also a series of tips by Mel and Patti Moreno, the Garden Girl- Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.

Here are some pictures & info about how people have put Mel's ideas to work for them. In any case, it's something some of you too might want to look into!


"Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." - Anonymous