{"id":1350,"date":"2013-03-12T08:17:04","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T12:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=1350"},"modified":"2013-03-12T08:17:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T12:17:04","slug":"gardening-efficiently-for-fun-and-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=1350","title":{"rendered":"gardening efficiently – for fun and profit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have gardened off and on for most of my life. Back in the 1980s, there was a show called “Square Foot Gardening” on PBS hosted by Mel Bartholomew. Now there is a website<\/a>. When we lived in Albany, we purchased the book {{Square Foot Gardening}} (which has been updated and simplified even further by {{Mel Bartholomew}} in the intervening years, and is now titled {{All New Square Foot Gardening}} (I reviewed SFG<\/a> a while back)). I also own a copy of the companion text, {{CA$H from Square Foot Gardening}} – though I never put any of the suggestions into practice for personal money-making.<\/p>\n

In college, I took a course on the culture of food, and my term paper was entitled, “Eating off the Grid<\/a>” (intro page<\/a> and associated diagrams<\/a>). The basic premise of the paper was that an efficiently-designed, efficiently-grown, and strategically-planned small garden can provide for individuals, families, or even whole neighborhoods – all with minimal up-front investment, and reduced on-going care cost and effort.<\/p>\n

With a recent rise on the popularity of “locavore<\/a>” eating, and the relative increase in observed popularity of canning, farmer’s markets, etc, it seems that for many people, growing at least some of their own food should be a “no brainer”.<\/p>\n

My wife and I have had a small (6×6) garden in our backyard for a couple years. Out of that space, we [typically] get not only a substantially better harvest than her dad does using a 50×100 plot in “garden farming” (aka, the “traditional” method of gardening, wherein folks try to grow miniaturized farms instead of scaling-up window gardens) – just a small example, the dozen or so hand melon<\/a>\u00a0vines he had took 1\/4 of the total ground space of his garden … which is nuts!<\/p>\n

I love making salsa, for example – this past summer out of just 4 plants, I got 4x more serrano peppers than I could use … and I can use a lot of serrano peppers \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The basics of SFG are easy – build a 4’x4′ box at least 6″ deep (full plans and kits are available in the books and on the website – or you can see the end of the paper I wrote<\/a>). The soil mix is also easy – peat moss, compost (which you will be able to create on your own going forward once you start gardening, if you have a small space in the back part of your yard), and vermiculite. Everything is organic<\/a>, and because the individual plots are so small, keeping-up with weeds is a cinch.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to replicate everything in the books here – they’re just too chock-full to do full justice in a blog post, and they’re so accessible without being condescending, that I can’t give a higher recommendation to read and own them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have gardened off and on for most of my life. Back in the 1980s, there was a show called “Square Foot Gardening” on PBS hosted by Mel Bartholomew. Now there is a website. When we lived in Albany, we purchased the book {{Square Foot Gardening}} (which has been updated and simplified even further by …
Continue reading gardening efficiently – for fun and profit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,9,15,16,31],"tags":[266,348,677,709],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-1350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-cool","category-food","category-fun","category-personal","tag-efficiency","tag-garden","tag-sfg","tag-squarefotgardening"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1350"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=1350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}