Hi, I'm Shawn Banks with the Cooperative Extension Service here in Johnston County.
And today we're here with Phil Rocheleau, and he’s gonna talk to us about building
a square foot garden and the importance of doing that.
So Phil why don't you go ahead and tell us what you are going to be doing.
Yes, Good Morning, I’m Phil Rocheleau, 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 4x4 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 Phil, 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 4' x 4', 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 Phil, 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 4 x 4 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 3-bend situation, and it does very well.
Well Phil 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 24 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 14 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 Phil, now that we got the amendments in here, Ummh what else do we need to do to
get this garden ready to grow?
Okay, we leveled out all the amendments of the compost, and what is in here is compost
from 9 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 14 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 12 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 4 inches, so you
can plant 9 in another square.
And if you get down to 2 inch separations thinning out, that would be 16 radishes, 16
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 4 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 3 weeks, plant another 2 or 1 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 4 x 4 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.
So this is the building of a square foot garden using Mel Bartholomew method.
The grid.
Thank you very much!
Excellent!