Today we're here with Mike and he’s gonna talk to us about building a square foot garden and the importance of doing that. So Mike why don't you go ahead and tell us what you are going to be doing. Yes, Good Morning, I’m Mike I live in Johnston County in a community called Meadow and we're here to build a square foot garden using materials that I have on hand, but these are not exclusive. You can use any other materials as long as you can make a x box, that's at least six inches high and then you’ll be able to have a garden with it. And we're gonna do that by using cinder blocks today, and showing you how it starts and then we’ll show you the most important part of the square foot garden is the grid, and with that we're gonna start building the box. Alright Mike, now that we have selected a sunny side to put the garden, with easy access to water.
What's the next step or the first step we need to do in constructing the garden? Okay, now that I got the dimensions, that we can start building with to make sure that we even and ' x ', we gonna take some weed fabric that I have over here and lay that down, and then we're gonna take some of this half inch welded wire, and we're gonna put that on top of the weed cloth. I use the welded wire to prevent the voles or moles from coming up from the bottom of the garden. So I'm gonna take my grid out of here so I can start placing the weed cloth and the screening and I’ll let you see that when we've completed it. Alright, lets go ahead and do that. Alright, Okay Mike, now that we got the landscape fabric down, the welded wire down what are we going to do next? Okay, the grid helped us to establish the x interior measurement, and what we're gonna start doing is laying down all the pavers, some people call them caps. Like I said I got for nearly nothing. Then we’re gonna put the cinder blocks, such as this, right on top of the pavers. And that way they are, voles and moles can't come up through that area. Because often times, I plant flowers in the holes and sometimes onions and it allow the bees to come and pollinate whatever I have planted. And so now we 're gonna start, laying down all the pavers, and then all the cinder blocks. Now that we got the bed built; what are we gonna put in it? Okay, we're gonna put in some soil amendment that consist of compost vermiculite, or course vermiculite and peat moss, or sphagnum moss, and we're gonna fill that up as high as we can go with what I have. I have over here a tumbler that I purchased because I'm getting up in age to be shoveling it into a -bend situation, and it does very well. Well Mike lets do this, and lets go ahead and lets go over there and we'll take a look at the compost bin and you can tell us a little bit more about compost. Alright, Okay my compost originally begin with pallets that load things up at trucking stations, and I put one into the other, then into the last one, and do my composting. Like I said earlier, getting up in age I'm not able to do that as well so I brought this tumbler, holds about cubit feet and whatever I have in the compost bin I throw it in there until it is filled, close it up, rotate it everyday and about days, I have some serious black gold looks really great. And with that, I’m gonna empty some of that into the garden cart. Alright lets go ahead and put this in there. As you can see this is some real black gold here. All I need to do is spread it out whenever it gets compacted, and you can do this with your hands very easily, and we're gonna get another dump because that tumbler wasn't empty. We'll be back. Okay Mike, now that we got the amendments in here, Ummh what else do we need to do to get this garden ready to grow? Prepare for the sunshine with patio dining sets. Make a price comparison from the United Kingdoms highest quality garden furniture merchants. Be equipped for Summertime Sun with garden dining sets from the UK - ellister, billyoh and so much more. Okay, we leveled out all the amendments of the compost, and what is in here is compost from different mediums, kelp, cow manure, chick manure, mushroom, and that's one third of this. The other third is peat moss, and then the final third was vermiculite, course vermiculite, and I just mixed it all together in my tumbler using the scraps that are in that box over there, and this is what we end up with in about days if you rotate that tumbler each and everyday. Now what we need to do is say okay, I have a garden here, and we can obviously plant whatever it is you like to plant, but do you know just by looking at this how much? I think not, so what I'm gonna do is introduce the most important part of the square foot garden, the grid. I designed this grid out of pvc pipe because I used it for hooping, and I had extra so I decided to make it so that I could put a water facet on the end, drill holes in it, and use it not only as a grid, but as a watering or an irrigation type method rather than spray with a hose all day long. So when you put this grid in, you can see there’s sixteen squares here. And depending on what crop you want to plant depends on how much you can put in each square. If you have a seed packet, and on the back it says separate every inches, well, that means you will plant one of those in one of these squares. If you had another packet for instance beets, it says it wants it every inches, so you can plant in another square. And if you get down to inch separations thinning out, that would be radishes, carrots, so forth and so on. So you have a whole lot of things you can do here and start small, you don't need to plant rows of cabbage for them to come up all at the same time, because you wouldn't buy that at the store at one time unless you are having a large group of people over. So you can plant one or two, wait weeks, plant another or and that way you get a progression going , and the same with tomatoes. With tomatoes or larger growing crops, you want to put them on the north wall. My home faces due south, so you will put them back here as I have with this over here, and they coming up. As you can see, some plants get pretty high, and take the sun away but because it’s facing due south, it had a chance to get above the zucchini and squash. And basically that's what we do when we build a x square foot gardening, and the addition for me, or the thing I didn't know later I learned well, if I put dirt in these holes, I plant flowers in them, I plant small crop in them, and they bring the bees to pollinate my garden. And that's basically all you really need to know about building a garden. |
