Gardening Inside the Box
Peter Burke wants you to think inside the box. The square foot garden box, that is!
A 4x4 square foot garden – the building block of square foot gardening
The Calais resident travels to City Market every month during the growing season to teach the popular square foot gardening class, showing people how to build beds and pathways, create perfect soil, plant in grids, trellis, practice succession planting, and keep a garden notebook to reflect on each unique season. It’s not unusual for people to linger after the class to pepper Peter with questions, or to return to take the class again to soak in the material more deeply and look for more advanced techniques to improve on what they are already doing.
Peter will return to teach Square Foot Gardening on Sunday, April 28th from 3-4:30 p.m. as part of City Market’s Spring into Gardening Week (April 21-28), a week filled with classes on everything from flower gardening (using City Market’s beautiful perennial gardens as a field site), to gardening with medicinal herbs, planting fruit trees and berry bushes, and becoming active in neighborhood and school gardens.
I caught the square foot gardening bug myself when I attended one of Peter’s classes a few years ago. With two children under the age of five, I was curious about how to incorporate more gardening into our lives without adding too much additional stress. Like many urban gardeners, I have a limited area in my backyard to garden, and Peter’s promise of bountiful yields of organic vegetables and colorful flowers in small spaces captured my imagination.
What makes square foot gardening really unique is its preciseness in how many seeds of different vegetable and flower varieties you can plant in each square foot for optimum yields.
People who have kept gardens will be familiar with the emphasis on creating high-quality soil (you receive instructions for how to mix your own perfect soil and maintain it year after year), raised beds (especially useful in urban areas that may have compromised soil), and planting vegetables in rotations, but the concept of planting very densely in a small space is new to most people. 16 carrots per square foot? Who knew you could pack them in that closely? 9 bush beans in a single square foot? Whoa!
Square foot garden grid spacing (image from naturallymariam.com)
Drawing your own grids and planning a garden begins to feel like child’s play, a fun, interactive way to really get a handle on gardening and not let it daunt you. For elders and children, and everyone in between, it’s a neat way to think about gardening and guarantees success in small spaces.
While we didn’t end up building a square foot garden that year, I return to the principles again and again, thinking about packing seeds in closely, in well-defined areas, and popping in flowers like marigolds here and there to delight my visual sense, as well. It’s a great class for new and seasoned gardeners who want to get started gardening or think about it in a new way.