Well I thought that this year I would try my hand at blogging about my gardens. Maybe a geeky thing to do, but ever since my wife handed me the All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew I have been hooked!
Admittedly it is a little pricey to start. The wood for the box, Peat moss, Vermiculite, and five different composts. Not to mention the hardware for building a trellis. However, once set up it only cost the price of seeds and/or transplants to put in your garden! If I am crafty enough this year I am going to build my very own grow light system and then I will only need to buy seeds :)
Our first year was a series of false starts and frustrations. When creating the soil, lovingly known to SFGers as Mel's Mix, you need enough to mix 1/3 Peat, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 blended compost. it was this last third that I struggled with. The compost had to be a blended mix of five different composts from five different sources. I got one from one place, albeit an organic gardening center near me. They make their own compost so I thought I must be safe. Wrong! I am not really sure what it was that I got but it wasn't the promised Zoo Doo that I had been hoping for. Basically i shorted my gardens of all the required nutrients need for successful garden, Idiot! How did i find this out? late in the season I started suspecting that the gardens were missing something. I went out and got some fertilizer and began using that.....Holy cow did my garden start growing!!! all summer my poor plants didn't receive enough nutrients from the compost! Damn it!
This year how ever I did the right thing and have a fairly well blended compost of 4.5 types. I wasn't sure of one of them so I only count it as a half source :P So this year with trowel in hand I am ready to sally forth with my two 4x4x6" boxes from last year and a brand new 4x4x10" for this year. In the works I plan on .....Well I will save that for another post :D
Until next time:
Happy gardening!
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