Mitchell's Vegetable Garden

Lest you think that I am the only gardener in the family, you need to meet Mitchell's veggies. He got interested in "square foot gardening" last summer and built two four-by-four boxes, complete with wire-frame tops to keep the critters out. He planted fall veggies and we enjoyed radishes, beets, lettuce and spinach. In fact we have been eating his spinach again for the past month.

This spring he decided to branch out and try a few more things. With a little digging help from a friend he has planted four tomatoes, five peppers of various colors and tastes, a patch of onions and some head lettuce. He is currently soaking spinach seed to add a row of new spinach. He has ordered a lattice to support his tomatoes as they grow, so that will be an interesting new part of the project.

We have neighbors who started this trend last spring. They had a lovely garden with excellent tomatoes growing on a similar lattice, and tons of other veggies. They were his inspiration. Unfortunately, we cannot keep up with the Jones on this, as they have already added two more 4 x 4's this spring.

SFG is a real theory of gardening, complete with a book and website, so if you want to really learn the principles I'd refer you to the expert - Mel Bartholomew at http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

Mitchell has found it to be an easy plan to follow and we got good results last year. We planted the beets too close together and did not thin them properly, so that was a bit of a disappointment, but the mistakes were all ours. We will do them again this fall, 'cause we really like them! The weeds are kept to a minimum by the raised bed, and it's easy to take care of, so works well for us. I'll keep you posted on his progress.