Square Foot Raised Bed Gardens

For the past several years I have been practicing square foot gardening. Square foot gardening can be any garden that is planned out in sections one foot on a side, but my garden is in two wooden containers three feet wide, twenty feet long and raised off the ground about thirty inches. One is completely filled with soil while the other has a floor with drainage holes set a foot down from the surface. Both beds have an embedded leaky hose to provide water with the least evaporation. The pattern of the hose divides the bed into one foot sections. One bed has a string trellis attached for growing pole beans and other vines. The Wikipedia piece on square foot gardening is a good place to start if you want to try this organic gardening method.

Practiced correctly square foot gardening is intensive horticulture. For those who know me this might seem like the least likely form of gardening for me, but until last year, when I never seemed to be home to care for the garden, my beds provided a big supplement to for my summer table at very little cost once the beds were built.

Although I get a dozen or more seed catalogs, this year all my seeds are coming from Pinetree Garden Seeds in New Gloucester, ME.  Their focus is on the small home gardener, and they keep costs down by not selling you as big a packet of seeds as a place like Burpees. For $1.35 you can get 500 lettuce seeds or 20 cucumber seeds in varieties that tend to favor heirlooms. All outdoor seeds are tested in Maine so you know they’ll grow around here. Here’s a list of this year’s choices and why I chose them:

Masai Bush Beans (47 days to maturity)-The bushes only grow a foot tall and yield heavily with a couple dozen very tasty beans per plant. All this is perfect for a square foot raised bed gardener. I set aside six squares and plant at one week intervals in the spring. This year I plan a mid-August planting for a September crop.

Purple Trionfo Violetto Pole Bean (60 days) For the trellis, beautiful light purple flowers followed by flavorful purple beans (they cook up green) that remain edible until almost eight inches long. A ten week harvesting period helps make this a great choice as well.

Long Island Improved Brussels Sprouts (85 days)-My favorite vegetable, but I have had bad luck with members of the cabbage family due to a plethora of pretty white cabbage butterflies. Hopefully, I’ll have a better eye for the caterpillars this year. This is an heirloom variety, but, as you may imagine, a lot of horticultural work has not gone into creating hybrid Brussels sprouts. One plant is put into a square foot.

Rainbow Carrots (57 days)-Up to five color varieties with slightly different tastes in each variety, if you don’t grow this, Adam at the NRT Farmer’s Market has them for sale.

Sea Foam Chard (53 days)-Boringly green compared to the more colorful red stemmed chard, this one is mild flavor and is good in salads or stir fried or steamed. Two plants per square, chard can be harvested all summer if you are careful not to cut too many leaves from one plant.

Miniature White Cucumbers (49 days)-A long vined variety like this is not really suited to the square foot unit so these delightful little picklers will probably end up on a trellis. Care must be taken in trellising a cucumber because the vine is much more tender than a pole bean.

Gourd Mixture-Another vining project. My uncle who worked for the New Enlgand Horticultural Society grew and dried gourds for crafts projects so I figured I’d try a mixture this year for fun.

Pinetree Lettuce Mix (40 days)-An all leaf, all sweet mix with a variety of colors and maturation dates, this mix works well in salads and sandwiches. Perfect for a square foot garden where you plant close together and “weed” as needed.

Summertime Lettuce (68 days)-The family has never had much luck with heading lettuce, but I tried this heat resistant type two years ago and got good results. Small heads make this ideal for the square foot plan and a small family.

Broccoli di Rapa-Novantina (30 days)- Broccoli rabe is pungent, but goes great with white beans, potato or pasta. The short growing time should help beat the cabbage moths. Good in early spring and again in fall, perfect for intensive gardens. The second planting will go in the squares from the first of the Masai beans.

Hailstone Radish (25 days) This heirloom variety from the 1800s is the fastest maturing radish around. The one inch round radishes can be planted close together. This is a new variety for me and supposedly has the tangy, pungent flavor that has been bred out of commercial varieties. Unlike unfragrant modern roses, I like modern sweeter radishes so this may be a disappointment. We'll see. Old-fashioned radishes are supposedly great with beer!

Tatsoi (45-50 days)-A Chinese green that can be picked leaf by leaf, this is a variety of a spinach mustard hardy down to 15 degrees so it can be planted when most other things are out of the garden.

Without a good window to start plants I’ll be buying my tender vegetable plants like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and basils from Gerry’s in Brockton although with eggplant and peppers its actually easier to buy the crop from Gerry’s. Peas never yield enough in a small garden (although I have had success with sugar snap pea pods) so I buy them as well. Squash and zucchini grow too well in a home garden so I buy them as needed.