Monthly tips from Square Foot Gardening
Presented by: Patti Moreno: The Garden Girl and Square Foot Gardening Inventor: Mel Bartholomew
Patti Moreno: I’m Patti Moreno, the Garden Girl.
Mel Bartholomew: And I’m Mel Bartholomew from the Square Foot Gardening.
Patti Moreno: This month, it’s May. Our garden is alive.
Mel Bartholomew: Yes.
Patti Moreno: It’s so fun out to be in the garden right now.
Mel Bartholomew: Everything is going on.
Patti Moreno: Because we are harvesting.
Mel Bartholomew: Right. We’re not only harvesting, we’re planting. We’re doing both and we’re going to replace some of those squares that we’ve harvested our spring crop and put it in our summer crop.
Patti Moreno: So what do we have to do to actually make that happen?
Mel Bartholomew: Actually it’s very simple. We don’t have to dig up the soil again, we don’t have to spread anything. What we’re going to do is as soon as we harvest one square foot, now let’s picture now. A square foot of radishes, 16 radishes in a square foot.
Patti Moreno: Right.
Mel Bartholomew: And when you’re all finished with that square foot of radishes, where beets, sort of carrots, whatever it is, you then add to that one square foot a handful or a troughful of compost. Blended compost hopefully from your pile which means by blended, we made from at least five different sources.
Patti Moreno: Okay.
Mel Bartholomew: Now think of what would be a source for compost?
Patti Moreno: Leaves.
Mel Bartholomew: Okay leaves, that’s good. And actually it’s anything that was once growing like leaves or stems, or plants, or flowers. It can also be any animal manure. If the animal doesn’t eat meat, so I like to think of it as barnyard manure.
Patti Moreno: Okay.
Mel Bartholomew: So that could be cows and horses, and let’s see, pigs are no but chickens could fit in there and ducks. And things like that. Then there are other things that are commercially available. Wood chips and sawdust, and bark, and all those can be composted you buy those at your nursery. So the summer crop would be anything with a large fruit that’s hanging. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, beans, all those things. There’s only one exception that I think I’ve had. Peas are a cool weather crop. They’re a spring crop and you get the little bush Friday or it gets a kind of there and climb up.
Patti Moreno: Speaking of climbing up.
Mel Bartholomew: Yes.
Patti Moreno: Now that we’ve got our tomatoes in there and our vining crops in there.
Mel Bartholomew: I promise to tell you all about vertical gardening.
Patti Moreno: Exactly.
Mel Bartholomew: Okay well I designed a very strong frame. It’s like a U-shaped upside down, it’s steel galvanized and you put ground rods into the ground first. These are steel rebars. You buy these at any home improvement. They cut up at any length you want, put those in the ground, the pipe slips right over them. The top comes right over, you have fittings there or you get a pipe bender. And then, that’s a strong and because it’s galvanized, it’ll last for a long time. Stick those in the ground with the right distance apart next to your box. Put it on the north side so that—
Patti Moreno: Okay I think that’s very important for people to know that when they’re going to put this vertical frame next with their box—
Mel Bartholomew: Right.
Patti Moreno: They want to plant it—affix it to the north side.
Mel Bartholomew: Right.
Patti Moreno: Which means those plants need to be on the north side.
Mel Bartholomew: Yes.
Patti Moreno: Correct?
Mel Bartholomew: Yes, right. They do and also that won’t shade the rest of the garden okay. So what are you saying about shade because remember, when we started we said, every garden needs six to eight hours of sunshine. And now, we’re going to tie netting to that. We use to use strings straight up and down and sometimes make a netting this way. But it took a lot of work and it breaks after a while. And now we found a wonderful material and its nylon netting. The openings are about this big, seven inches by seven inches, you can reach your hands through and get those tomatoes and pull them back out. And it’s rock resistant, guaranteed to last 20 years.
Patti Moreno: Wow! I love also having the vertical garden because we’re really maximizing are growing space.
Mel Bartholomew: Yes absolutely.
Patti Moreno: We shrunk it down to 20% of the size of a traditional garden.
Mel Bartholomew: Right.
Patti Moreno: And now, we’re maximizing that smaller space. I’m now taking our garden and making it grow.
Mel Bartholomew: Why don’t we grow things vertically?
Patti Moreno: Now is the time we have no longer have to stake our tomatoes and tie them up as they grow. All we’re doing is just weaving it through our vertical support in next month, June.
Mel Bartholomew: Oh! I’m going to—
Patti Moreno: We’re in the heat of the summer now.
Mel Bartholomew: Yes we’re starting the heat of the summer and we’re going to show you two things at our special. One is how to grow lettuce all summer long in the heat and number two, is how we can not stake but support the pepper plants and the eggplants. Because you know what, pepper plant is very brittle and when the rains come and it gets big and the fruits hanging in there sometimes a whole branch breaks off. I’m going to show you a way, a simple, easy, no work way all square foot gardening is, no worries. So make sure you tune in.
Patti Moreno: I can’t wait. I’m Pattie Moreno the Garden Girl.
Mel Bartholomew: And this is Mel Bartholomew wishing you a happy gardening.
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