Skip to content

antipaucity

fighting the lack of good ideas

gardening efficiently – for fun and profit

Posted on 12 March 201311 March 2013 By antipaucity 2 Comments on gardening efficiently – for fun and profit

I have gardened off and on for most of my life. Back in the 1980s, there was a show called “Square Foot Gardening” on PBS hosted by Mel Bartholomew. Now there is a website. When we lived in Albany, we purchased the book Square Foot Gardening (which has been updated and simplified even further by Mel Bartholomew in the intervening years, and is now titled All New Square Foot Gardening (I reviewed SFG a while back)). I also own a copy of the companion text, CA$H from Square Foot Gardening – though I never put any of the suggestions into practice for personal money-making.

In college, I took a course on the culture of food, and my term paper was entitled, “Eating off the Grid” (intro page and associated diagrams). The basic premise of the paper was that an efficiently-designed, efficiently-grown, and strategically-planned small garden can provide for individuals, families, or even whole neighborhoods – all with minimal up-front investment, and reduced on-going care cost and effort.

With a recent rise on the popularity of “locavore” eating, and the relative increase in observed popularity of canning, farmer’s markets, etc, it seems that for many people, growing at least some of their own food should be a “no brainer”.

My wife and I have had a small (6×6) garden in our backyard for a couple years. Out of that space, we [typically] get not only a substantially better harvest than her dad does using a 50×100 plot in “garden farming” (aka, the “traditional” method of gardening, wherein folks try to grow miniaturized farms instead of scaling-up window gardens) – just a small example, the dozen or so hand melon vines he had took 1/4 of the total ground space of his garden … which is nuts!

I love making salsa, for example – this past summer out of just 4 plants, I got 4x more serrano peppers than I could use … and I can use a lot of serrano peppers 🙂

The basics of SFG are easy – build a 4’x4′ box at least 6″ deep (full plans and kits are available in the books and on the website – or you can see the end of the paper I wrote). The soil mix is also easy – peat moss, compost (which you will be able to create on your own going forward once you start gardening, if you have a small space in the back part of your yard), and vermiculite. Everything is organic, and because the individual plots are so small, keeping-up with weeds is a cinch.

I’m not going to replicate everything in the books here – they’re just too chock-full to do full justice in a blog post, and they’re so accessible without being condescending, that I can’t give a higher recommendation to read and own them.

commentary, cool, food, fun, personal Tags:efficiency, garden, sfg, squarefotgardening

Post navigation

Previous Post: thanks, {redacted}
Next Post: get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit – law 7 – #48laws by robert greene

More Related Articles

ben thompson missed *a lot* in his microsoft-github article commentary
doing technical phone screens education
ninja dualbrew pro cfp301 review cool
integrisure – the business that never was commentary
jersey city commentary
groupon is no good! cool

Comments (2) on “gardening efficiently – for fun and profit”

  1. Tanner Lovelace says:
    14 March 2013 at 04:03

    I did my first SFG last year and even though I only had 6 squares actually growing vegetables it went pretty well. I didn’t actually get it started until late summer, so I haven’t yet had a full season under my belt. I’m very much looking forward to this year to see what I can do with it.

  2. Warren says:
    15 March 2013 at 10:22

    hope you do great with it this year … there’s a lot you could be starting indoors even now in NC 🙂

Comments are closed.

March 2013
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  
« Feb   Apr »
  • Patrick Henry 23 March 1775
  • Reincarnation by Wallace McCrae (adapted by Warren Myers)
  • Famed was Beowulf
  • Fuzzy Wuzzy (anonymous)
  • One bright morning in the middle of the night (various)

Books

  • Debugging and Supporting Software Systems
  • Storage Series

External

  • Backblaze
  • Cirkul
  • Digital Ocean
  • Fundrise
  • Great Big Purple Sign
  • Password Generator
  • PayPal
  • Tech News Channel on Telegram
  • Wish List

Other Blogs

  • Abiding in Hesed
  • Chris Agocs
  • Eric Hydrick
  • Jay Loden
  • Paragraph
  • skh:tec
  • Tech News Channel on Telegram
  • Veritas Equitas

Profiles

  • LinkedIn
  • Server Fault
  • Stack Overflow
  • Super User
  • Telegram
  • Twitter

Resume

  • LinkedIn
  • Resume (PDF)

Services

  • Datente
  • IP check
  • Password Generator
  • Tech News Channel on Telegram

Support

  • Backblaze
  • Built Bar
  • Cirkul
  • Digital Ocean
  • Donations
  • Fundrise
  • PayPal
  • Robinhood
  • Wish List

Copyright © 2023 antipaucity.

Powered by PressBook Green WordPress theme