Anyone else do Square Foot Gardening?

[nightshade]

raised beds are pretty much a must here. I joke we live in a stone quary. I have had pretty good luck with them. I use a mix of mostly compost and some topsoil, even in my flower beds. I add a top dressing of a few inches of new compost every late fall early winter or late winter early spring. Then it gets mixed in with the new plantings.

Boy I can't wait for spring

 

[mom'sfolly]

I think ordering topsoil or compost from a garden supply place might work better than filling the beds with bags. Just topsoil would probably need some organic matter worked into it. A yard of topsoil, with a large bag of peat and several bags of composted manure should get you a pretty nice soil mix (one cubic yard=27 cubic feet, 3 cubic feet of peat and manure for the rest). I used to do square foot gardening on a pretty large scale when I lived in NY, it's amazing what you can grow in a relatively small area. I've done a raised bed here in Texas (8x8), but the trees are too big now for me to be able to grow veggies. We did our raised bed with untreated 2X12s bolted together with long lag screws. Easy to assemble and it's lasted a long while. The bed is part of the girls run now, they love the rich, wormy soil mix. I turn it periodically for the girls to scratch in.

 

[AhBee01]

I didn't even think about anything leaching out of the tires! do you think they would still be leaching out if the tires are really old?
I knew about the treated wood! I love this site, so many good ideas!
I checked out the sister site too! Awsome!
Brenda

 

[patandchickens]

Here's a summary of the history of peoples' opinions of the safety of growing in old tires: "they're safe" "they're not safe" "they're safe" "they're not safe" "well maybe they are safe".

.

Current thinking seems to be that perhaps they do not actually leach meaningful amounts of harmful stuff into garden soil or veggies.

However to me the evidence on which these conclusions are based (what I've been able to find anyhow) is not directly comparable to what people do in their gardens. My opinion: probabably not a suicidal way to garden or anything like that, but I ain't doing it myself. Very old, weathered tires are probably actually *riskier* than relatively newer tires, btw.

If you are buying bulk topsoil, ask a buncha questions first. Where topsoil comes from is the stuff that is sc-raped off of land that's being built over for houses, shopping malls etcetera, and the history of that land can vary a LOT. While most commercially-obtained topsoil is not too bad, some of it is tremendously weedy, and if you get stuff from land that was a cornfield last year it can be full of so many herbicides that not much will grow in it. Uncommon but it does happen.

Personally I would buy triple mix rather than topsoil, if I had to buy soil. It's not without variation or risk either, but arguably less so than topsoil, and arguably better to grow stuff in.

Pat

 

[Pelican49]

Quote:
I had to laugh at this. Last summer when I bought my country property, one of the deal breakers was that they clean up the land to my satisfaction - including the tires. There were tires everywhere up to a tire off one of those huge quarry dump trucks. There was the bed of an old pickup, just the bed, surrounded by wire, filled with tires. Tires were holding up the old chicken coop. Tires were holding up their dogs run. There were tires 2 deep, surrounding the pond (decorative?) Perhaps just mosquito nesting grounds? I dunno. There must of been hundreds of them. Don't know what they did with all of them, but they were gone before I signed. LOL. Including the truck bed.

 

[AhBee01]

So now I know where all them tires went, they threw them on my land!!! Just kidding!
I didn't think the garden would look so nice with a bunch of old tires laying around anyway!
Brenda
This is what I had in mind with all them tires!
http://www.wuvie.net/tireplanter.htm

 

[Pelican49]

Quote:
Hey.... my Dad made one of those for my Mother when I was little (that would have been in the 50s).