square foot gardening

it's that time of year...time to start the garden.  last year was the first time mymichael and i planted a garden.  my grandma plants a "square foot garden" each year in addition to my grandpas traditional row garden.  the square foot garden is nice because it is above ground and it is much more manageable.  they can be as large or as small as you want.  last year mymichael and i built a 6' long by 2' wide and 6" deep box.  you want your box to be located where your yard gets lots of sun.  once you have your spot selected it is good to put landscaping material (or i have heard of newspapers) under your box to prevent grass and weeds from growing.  then fill your box with all new gardening soil.  to make the square foot gardening easy they suggest that you use string to divide your box into square foots so you can actually see your boundaries.  then select what vegetables or flower syou want to grow.  some vegetables you can only have one plant per square foot, but then others you can have 9 in a square foot.  so that we could figure out what we were going ot plant and where, i drew up this handy dandy square foot garden layout...your lucky i didn't put it in autocad to scale! 

our garden this year will consist of okra, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, banana peppers, spinach, lettuce, zucchini, white squash, yellow squash, cucumber, jalapenos, and multiple herbs such as basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, parsley and sage.

here is a list of a few vegetables and how many you can plant per square foot (there is an actual square foot gardening book...so look to that for exact details and such):

okra - 1 plant

tomato - 1 plant

corn - 1 plant

onion - 9 plants

bell peppers - 2 plants

lettuce - 4 plants

spinach - 9 plants

zucchini - 1 plant

yellow squash - 1 plant

cucumber - 1 plant

basil - 1 plant

i can't wait, i love fresh vegetables and herbs.  just fyi, we don't plant from the seeds.  we buy the little plants that have already started to grow and transplant them to our garden.  if you want to start from seeds you can it just takes a lot more time and work and you have to start much earlier in the year.  last year we got quite a bit of produce, we had some plants die but over all it went well.  there is so much to know about gardening and i really don't know anything other than to water them.  my grandma and granpas are pros and have beautiful gardens each year.  mymichael is pretty good as well...i credit him for ours last year.  the things i tend to grow on my own...well they die.  so thank you mymichael for the future watering of our garden this year!

are you growing anything this year?  if so, what?