Patti Moreno: Hi I’m Patti Moreno, the garden girl.
Mel Bartholomew: And I’m Mel Bartholomew with the Square Foot Gardening Foundation.
Patti Moreno: We are here this month, and you know this is a busy month for garden. What are some of the things that a gardener needs to be doing right now?
Mel Bartholomew: It all depends on what kind of a garden you have. Now, if you have an old fashioned, single row garden, you know it’s way out back far, far away from the house you’ve got to decide. First you got to clean up from last fall because I bet you got tired of weeding and you left some tools out there and you were discouraged and you didn’t pick up all the vines and the dead stuff. So the garden looks a mess.
But with the square foot garden, you cleaned up on the fall, because it is small so there’s not a lot to do, and you always keep your garden neat and tidy. That way you will take more pride in it. But you can go back and start working again without doing a lot of work. You don’t get discourage of having to clean up everything.
Forget all about the single row garden because you’ve got to till the soil, and you might till it a little too soon, it might be frozen, or clumps in it. If it’s too wet, you’ll going to make a mess of the soil, you’ll going to destroy the structure of the soil.
Patti Moreno: So in some areas right now, it is warm enough so that you can start either planting plants or sowing seeds.
Mel Bartholomew: Right, don’t you wish you lived in that part of the country?
Patti Moreno: I do, I do, I just envy them so much. They have longer growing seasons.
Mel Bartholomew: But most of the country has to wait until the proper time. So it all depends on your last frost state and we explained last month how to find that date, and how to determine all those things.
Patti Moreno: Let’s talk about compost. I think there are a lot of people out there want to start doing it but are just kind of clueless about it.
Mel Bartholomew: Right. Well. It’s very simple because it’s mother’s natures way of decomposing anything that is was once growing. Every time you replant one square foot you harvest that one square foot and you replant, you add a handful of or a trowel full of compost mixed it in.
Patti Moreno: And that’s basically adding more nutrients back into the mix.
Mel Bartholomew: Every time, every time. So that’s why we don’t need any fertilizer, commercial fertilizer because we have compost, nice variety of compost, made from many sources. And that is why it is important to have your own compost made from your kitchen scraps and your leaves and all those other good things. So we are going to chop it up, we will keep it moist, put it in a big pile and the pile should be at least 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet and the biggest pile should be 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet. Those are two variable sizes.
Patti Moreno: So it doesn’t take that too much then.
Mel Bartholomew: No, not at all, actually the size of a square foot garden, 4 by 4.
Patti Moreno: All of you out there who can start planting now, I’m really jealous of you. It is a busy time in the garden, get started. get out there, get some fresh air and tune in next month, because April, that’s a huge month in the garden.
Mel Bartholomew: All over the country.
Patti Moreno: So stay tune, check us out next month where we will going to give you a lot of tips on what you should be doing in your garden in April, a great month.
Mel Bartholomew: This is Mel Bartholomew wishing you happy gardening.
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