Square foot gardening

We have an unusual space for gardening: a tiny front yard (where we pulled up all the grass and put in plants) and a rooftop deck. The front yard is not fenced, and so we have not planted much there. We do get a fair amount of foot traffic from the neighborhood, and we're afraid that people would steal our produce. We have, although, planted several herbs down there which any neighbors can pick when they need a herb for a meal. But the front yard is not conducive to planting much in the way of food.

So that leaves the rooftop deck. The best and worst things about the deck are the wind and the strong sunshine. The wind blows probably 5-10MPH faster on the 4th floor deck than on the ground, drying everything out. And the sun will just bake bake bake whatever is up there.

What to do?

We've been considering adding a greenhouse up there to shelter plants from the wind and sun. That's an expensive, practically permanent addition to the house. We're moving slowly on that, but in the meantime, we're taking another look at "Square Foot Gardening." Check out Mel Bartholomew's website here.

Rather than haul a ton of dirt to the roof and plant a 4'x4' square of garden space, we decided to build a 4'x4' wooden block and place containers inSIDE of that.

So, we have four rows of containers:

• four 12" pots on the first row
• four 12" pots on the second row
• a 14" pot + a long rectangular planter on the third row; and
• three 16" pots on the back (fourth) row.

The three pots in the back row all have tomato cages in them, as two of them have small tomato plants and the third we have planted some Bush Lake 47 green beans.

So instead of 16 1'x1' grids, as you would get in a typical 4'x4' square foot garden block, we have 13 pots of varying sizes, inside the 4'x4' block. We'll see how well it works.

From seed, we are hoping to grow:

• nasturtium (edible) flowers
• cucumber (bush)
• mesclun mix (salad greens) (sprouting!)
• marigold (edible) flowers (sprouting!)
• swiss chard (sprouting!)
• chamomile herb (sprouting!)
• butterhead lettuce (sprouting!)
• mizuna (salad green) and
• green beans
  

This is also the first year we'll try to install a drip irrigation system, using Raindrip products. One would hope that, in the garden, each year will be better than the last. One would hope.

Can't post any pictures at the moment because of a glitch with the camera which should be fixed very soon.