Can Square Foot Gardening Yield a Harvest for a Family of Black Thumbs???

How can one be truly self-sufficient if they cannot grow their own food? There may be relevant answers to this question but I certainly cannot think of any right at this moment. If you are like me and you take a moment to think about how dependent you are on others for food then you will find it down right scary! I will tackle storing water in another post because the two surely go hand and hand. For now I want to start with our history of "gardening" along with a refreshed attempt now that we have begun our journey.

Our History of Gardening

Not sure if you can tell or not but that is an Earth Box with Trellis! This picture tells the perfect story of a short and unfortunate history of gardening. We spent about $100 in total materials and never picked one tomato. We found gardening to be miserable and unrewarding the first time around so with that in mind we needed a fresh approach given the critical nature of this task.

A Fresh Start

Enter this book, I actually read it from front to back:

If gardening had a Tony Robbins of motivational speaking it would be Mel Bartholomew. Upon completion of this book I was not confident that I could grow my own food, I was convinced! He gets you so fired up and makes everything sound so easy that you just can't wait to try it! The concept is simple, build a 4x4 raised bed that is six inches deep and divide it into sixteen squares. Then add the "perfect" soil mix and Voila, a bountiful harvest for all to enjoy. Construction began immediately...

Following the instructions in the book we made a couple of boxes.

Creating the boxes seemed pretty straight forward but coming up with a large batch of magical soil known as "Mel's Mix" was a whole other story. Here is the "simple" formula as Mel puts it:

• 1/3 Blended Compost
• 1/3 Peat Moss
• 1/3 Coarse Vermiculite

Mix equal parts of each, measured by volume, not by weight. The problem is that here in the Tampa Bay area, two of the three ingredients are not easy to find. Furthermore, the blended compost ideally has to be made up of 5 different composts! It took about 3 hours of research and phone calls to find the five sources that I needed. Here they are in case I can save you some time:

1. Black Kow Manure compost from any major store (Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes etc)
2. Organic Lawn and Garden Compost from Wal-Mart
3. Big Earth Landscape Supply at 9502 East MLK BLVD  - PH:813-626-3270
4. Mother's Organic - Waste Disposal and Humus Farm at 6727 CR 579 - PH:813-628-0600
5. Hillsborough County Yard Waste Processing Facility at 350 North Falkenburg Rd - PH:813-744-5599

WORD OF WARNING: The bottom three places sell compost in BULK mainly to major landscaping companies but they also cater to the public. If you are an average joe like me though this presents a problem in the preferred unit of measurement that they use. The lady on the phone politely told me they sold compost by the yard but if she had known I was ignorant she would have said a cubic yard which is a unit of volume that roughly weighs about 2,000 lbs. Anyhow, I borrowed a friends truck, threw a couple of empty storage tubs in the back, and off I went. About a half hour later, with the help of a FRONT LOADER, this is what I got for $8.75

Yes, I only intended to get two rubbermaid tubs full but what I got was a Spanish speaking Front Loader driver and a quarter cubic yard of dirt dropped right in the bed of the truck! I saw him driving towards me and I was like HOLY CRAP!!! Only $8.75 for all that compost but then I had to pay $49 for a shiny new wheelbarrow just to get it in the back yard.

So that leaves the remaining two ingredients. Peat moss is readily available but coarse Vermiculite in a 3.8 cubic foot bag is very hard to find. This is what it looks like:

I found it at Shell's Feed and Garden Supply in Tampa. Really nice folks and they have a good supply of Vermiculite and a really nice guy to help you out to your car too! Here is a link to the website:

http://www.shellsfeed.com/index.html

Now it was time to make Mel's Mix, the perfect soil!! Here is a picture of the finished mix:

We used an 18 gallon storage tub as the perfect measuring cup for each ingredient. The soil looked perfect in my opinion, just like the picture in the book. Now time will tell if it really works!

Here are what the finished products look like:

Now it's time to figure out what can be planted in Florida (Zone 9) in the fall. This is an awesome place to start:

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/vh021

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/topic_vegetable_gardening

Future posts will explore building of enclosures to protect your garden boxes from pests and critters as well as the first planting of seeds!!!