square foot gardening

my friend had told me about another gardening method to try. read the book in the second half of the summer and decided to give it a try. square foot gardening by mel bartholomew. retired engineer. http://www.squarefootgardening.org/. i built two 4'x4' boxes out of 2x8 pine untreated. made the mix - 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 compost (that we made ourselves!). very loose stuff once we got it all mixed. they key is supposed to be the soil mix, the fact that you never walk on it, and the grid -- you divided th 4x4 box up in to 16 one-foot squares. i used twine strung between nails to grid off one box and went ahead and planted some lettuce 2 weekends ago to try and get a fall crop in. starting to sprout already. the soil mix seems to really hold moisture well. given how loose it is though, i wonder how it will do with larger plants like tomatoes.

2010 in review

progress this summer, but still not what i was hoping for in terms of yield. definitely got more tomatoes, but nowhere near what i had in mind. probably got 30 or 40 total good size ones, and 50-100 cherries. a few carrots, two handfuls of potatoes (grown from 1 handful of potato seed, so not the best return, but very fun to dig up), a bunch of lettuce, one watermelon (picture above), a few 'volunteer' decorator pumpkins (that matured in july and are now rotten!), 10 or so good cucumbers, some excellent snap peas, basil and mint.

must have been a great year for apples, though, as our 2 apple trees produced a ton of apples. we made a batch of applesauce and borrowed a friend's cider press to make some delicious cider! the bees found us halfway through that process and were going nuts. also did a big batch of grape jelly. i thought we may have lost our 1 remaining concord grape vines in the blizzard of 2009 last Christmas, but it hung in there and provided a great harvest, and this year, the jelly actually set up unlike last years runny jelly which we ended up using as syrup. here's the bountiful grape harvest:

not sure if i mentioned it in the past, but we got 5 chickens this spring. already laying, almost a year old. i've been adding the poop to the compost pile - hopefully that will mean good things for the next batch of compost!