Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

Today I plucked this season’s first bright red cherry tomato from my garden and popped it into my mouth. It burst forth with such amazing tomato flavor—the true, honest to goodness flavor of tomatoes, not the mealy barely-something flavor of the pinkish supermarket tomatoes that I’ve been getting up to now. There are ripening tomatoes covering my five tomato plants this year, and I cannot wait to experience my first season of tomato gluttony.

It all started two summers ago, when, in the middle of June, I decided that I wanted to grow vegetables in the backyard. Please understand, I knew absolutely nothing about gardening. Nothing. So, naturally, I bought a book. After reading hundreds of Amazonian comments, I decided on Square Foot Gardening.

The first thing I did was read the entire book from cover to cover. That took two days. Then, following Bartholomew’s instructions, I began to dig a big hole in the backyard. I live in the California Bay Area, on the inland side where the weather is not as temperate as the bay side. During summers, the temperature regularly reaches the high nineties by midday, though to be fair, the air is pretty dry. It took an entire weekend to dig a hole to Bartholomew’s specifications, with some help from my sympathetic husband.

The next weekend I went to the local nursery and bought my supplies: a trowel, two cubic feet of organic matter, a huge bag of vermiculite, seeds. By the end of the day I had my square foot garden planted and ready to produce some vegetables! Now came the hard part: keeping my plants alive. All my seeds sprouted, but keeping the sprouts from getting eaten or dying of thirst was maddening. There were holes in most of the leaves, and something was snipping the top of every basil sprout clean off. Something else was digging small holes by each plant. Other plants never grew higher than an inch or two off the ground.

After two months of hand watering daily, baiting slugs, hovering over the small plants during the day, and peering at them through the back door every evening, I finally harvested: three beets, one 2-inch-long carrot, two heads of broccoli, three snow peas, and one tomato. Everything else died or was eaten.

I tried again the next year, with approximately the same amount of success, but I learned some new things: I can’t keep sprouts alive, so I should just buy the little plants from the nursery and transplant them. Lettuce is great because you just snip off what you need for dinner each day and let the new leaves keep growing in. Covering the entire garden with some sort of mesh prevents the larger animals from eating the plants. I also decided that the most valuable garden vegetable is the tomato, because you can buy other vegetables if you need to, but you just can’t get a tomato that tastes like tomato at the supermarket.

This year, I put all my knowledge into action. I bought a bird net, skipped sowing seeds entirely and simply transplanted lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers, and beets into my garden bed. We had an automatic sprinkler system installed with our landscaping, so I am no longer hand-watering.

Finally, I made one really exciting new purchase that will change the face of my gardening as I know it: the Tomato Success Kit. The kit came with a self-watering planter, special soil, organic fertilizer, and a cage that attaches to the planter lip. I have positioned it on the patio to receive a full day of sunlight, and the two plants in it have been growing like mad since mid-April. Although I was skeptical of its boastful name at first, I do believe this is truly going to be the year of my tomato success. The first bite was off to a good start.

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

tags: books book reviews gardening tomatoes mel bartholomew