Square foot garden - preparing a bed

The best thing about the square foot gardening method is that you don't have to dig up the ground, rip up sod and rototill every year. You just put the raised bed on top of whatever soil you've got. I'm not a bit lazy, but if there's a way to garden without a lot of sweat and hard manual labor, count me in!

I ran a string from the exterior wall of the house down through where the garden will be. This way, I can square up the raised beds with the house. The perennial garden isn't parallel or perpendicular to the house. It doesn't look bad, but I would prefer that the vegetable garden lines up with the walls of the house.

 

I'd gone back and forth on whether or not to put chicken wire down under the beds to keep critters from digging up into the beds and eating the plants from the bottom up.  I decided that I wouldn't regret taking the extra precaution.  Jasper's a good barn cat, but I don't want him to feel guilty for not catching some mole that ate my asparagus!

 

Chicken wire is easy to work with, but please wear gloves and be careful!  The ends of the wire are very sharp! It's easier to manage if you fold the sharp cut ends under.

 

I rolled it out next to the bed, then used wire cutters to snip it to the length I needed. I didn't measure....just eye-balled it.

 

 

 

 

I laid out the wire in the bed and used landscape staples to temporarily anchor it down. My original plan was to mow the grass here before putting all this in. However, my lawn tractor isn't here yet. It should have been here five days ago, but it's not so I forged ahead anyway. The chicken wire flattened all that tall grass nicely.

 

 

The next step was to put down a layer of heavy-duty landscape fabric. Again, I didn't measure it...just unrolled it and eye-balled the right length.

 







I used the landscape staples to hold it all down. The ground was so rock-hard that I had to pound the staples in with a hammer. I sure am glad I didn't have to dig into that stuff for a garden! I'd have given up after 10 minutes!

These are the staples I used.

 

It's a little hard to see in the photo below, but there are staples along the inside top edge.

 

 

While the landscape fabric is enough to keep the grass from growing through the bed, I happen to have about 20 tons of packing paper and cardboard boxes laying around. I put some of each down on top of the landscape fabric. In the short term, it'll help kill the grass under the beds. Over time, it'll decompose and add some nitrogen to the soil.

 

I put the paper down....

 

 

...then the cardboard.

 

 

The two 4' x 10' beds are ready for the filler. 

 



 

 

Today, I put in about an hour of work on this. It's not a lot of time, but remember once the beds are set up and filled, you don't need to do it ever again. It's a one-time chore. And a whole lot easier than digging!

 

In the next post, I'll go into detail about the special soilless mix that's used in Square Foot Gardening. And tell you the story of why I moved a bunch of the soilless mix from New Mexico to Colorado. Yes, I moved dirt 400 miles.