Square foot gardening - the future of growing your own vegetables
Have you ever heard of square foot gardening? If you have, good, that means you are one step closer to learning how to grow your own garden! Square foot gardening is a fairly new way to make gardening easier, and it’s trending for a reason. Fresh Earth Bistro has just dropped a compact, easy-to-use (and magical?) gardening product - The Seeding Square.
Why do you need the Seeding Square for your garden? That’s easy, because it makes gardening simple, more precise and helps with weed management! Seems like the Seeding Square is a great gardening tool for beginners doesn’t it? So what exactly is square-foot gardening and how will it help me grow my vegetables at home?
Square-foot Gardening is where seeds are sown in specific positions within a square foot, allowing enough room for each seed to grow to maturity without wasting space. The Seeding Square is a square piece of plastic with color-coded holes that allows you to easily plant 46 different types of vegetables with proper spacing. In other words, it is a gardening template that will help growers properly space their seeds within their garden.
Why is this useful? Well, for starters, most of us reading this probably aren’t living on acres upon acres of land, with unrestricted access to plant rows of beautiful fruits and veggies.
Most of us, especially millennials, live in apartments with minimal space to grow our own food. So, we have to get crafty about gardening in small spaces… so how square-foot gardening help me becoming a better grower?
Imagine rows and rows of corn on giant farms in Oklahoma. That’s the opposite of square-foot gardening. Square-foot gardening is packing every possible inch of soil in a raised bed with plants without overcrowding the seeds. If plants are too close, they can limit each other’s grow potential or even kill each other. So planting too close is out. What about spaced-out and pretty rows? Those are fun but so much space is wasted, therefore, it makes it very difficult to conserve precious resources like fertilizer and water.
Our Seed Squares can help growers pack in as many plants as possible in a manner that is safe for the plants, while also extremely effective at covering the soil properly. That soil coverage allows for more water retention, which can save you a lot of water. On top of saving resources, you maximize your yield per square foot. That’s important if you can’t afford to purchase and manage 200 acres of fertile farmland.
Square-foot gardening makes it possible for people who are new to gardening with average means to grow food for themselves, their families, neighbors, and friends. With a looming food crisis, it might be a good time to pick up a fun hobby that can also feed you. But sure you learn to do it in a way that can actually feed you.
Using the square-foot gardening method, experienced Gardners have yielded 100 pounds of carrots grown in a 32 square-foot raised bed. Now compare that to row gardening, which would require 300 square feet to get the same 100 pound yield.
To accomplish that, you need to place your seeds at a very specific distance apart and in a specific shape. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be out in the garden with a ruler trying to make this happen. The Seeding Square takes the guesswork out of all of that.
Anyone who has handled seeds before knows how hard it can be to handle them. The spoon included with the seeding square makes handling them much easier, and allows for more precise sowing.
So if you want to grow enough food to feed your family, use the square-foot gardening method.
If you want to do it effectively and don’t want to fumble around with rulers and seeds slipping through your fingers, use the Seeding Square.