I haven't thus far but am definitely thinking about it, and seeing your photos is encouraging.

I have tried taking a "scattered" approach with my vegetables this year but it really is not my style, so the square foot plantings would give the garden a bit more sense of order. I just love orderly rows/sections of vegetables in a garden. I will definitely try it with the next round of lettuce and spinach. I guess the flowers in the garden will have to provide the "counterpoint" as Jennifer Bartley puts it, of randomness and surprise.

This is a great post, I'm sure many people use the square foot method and even more will be interested now.

Every time I look at your garden photos I think...someday maybe - your garden is just beautiful!! Thanks for sharing it!

Your garden is so pretty!

I don't know what you'd call my gardening style...eclectic, I guess. It kind of incorporates square foot gardening, french intensive planting, companion planting and a lot of mirror reverse plantings.

Around the bench/arbor I have the tomatoes, basil, marigolds and bee balm, but they are planted in the same order on each side. I have a birdbath in the middle of the long veggie bed, with geraniums on either side, but this will be a mixture of beans, bush melons, zucchini, peas, broccoli in a few places and lots of flowers. The middle beds (3' x 5') are for salad stuff, mini-veggies and more flowers. I use alyssum under everything and strawberries under all the shrubs.

My biggest "negative" with gardening is weeding, so I plant things fairly close together and use the alyssum and strawberries to shade the soil and choke out the weeds. It's pretty and the more formal design helps keep it from looking too chaotic...I hope :)

I actually started out with square foot gardening. My original garden was 20x20'. Then, I discovered the potager and realized that is what I really wanted. I still use the square foot spacing. I also still have the original "Mel's mix" in the original 4 4x8' beds. At the end of summer last year I dumped grass and leaf clippings right on top of the beds to help amend them and that seemed to work really well.

My perimeter beds, the new hop yard and the outside front border are lasagna gardens. I highly recommend that technique as a back saver for the lone gardener clearing new garden areas.

Laura, your garden has to be the most magazine-worthy I've seen within these GW walls. It's so pretty!

Our gardening started with the square-foot method back in 1986. After a couple years I basically abandoned the strict guidelines and went on to do my own free-style. You'll find what works best for you.

Have to say I smiled when I saw the dividers. We used string. Of course your creative mind would kick that up a notch. ;)

I got out my old square foot garden book and tried to apply its principles in my new potager. It works for some veggies but others seem to do better scatter-seeded around other vegs. For instance, lettuce seeded around tomatoes. But the kale & spinach went in, in short rows, across 3.5' width of a bed. So it's a mix. I'm just not square.

Carol

How fun it is to hear about your thoughts and experiences with square-foot gardening, and thank you so much for your very sweet compliments. Our garden plan definitely came to life as a result of lots of inspiration from others.

Chickadeemelrose - I know what you mean about the feel of orderly rows!! There's something so serene about them.

Lavender lass - I'm trying your suggestion of using alyssum under the plants instead of mulch. I hadn't thought of using strawberries in this way too. By the way, are there any photos of your garden hanging around?? It sounds amazing!

Ali-b - It's good to know that lasagna gardening was effective for you. There just might be some new beds in our future :)

natal - do you feel as though you were able to grow more within the square-foot garden? I'm sure string worked just fine. I did consider it, but we live in a super windy area and I thought we'd better use something that would stay put. By the way - I adore your garden.

Carol6ma - That's the beauty of gardening isn't it? We can mix and match techniques and have fun experimenting. Are you following the companion planting suggestions or have you just discovered what veggie combinations work best for you?

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Happy gardening!!

Lulabelle, your garden is so beautiful! I visited your blog, and I am so impressed with your photos and garden design! Thanks for sharing!

I use SFG as a reference for spacing but I do not keep a grid on my beds. I am building some of beds out of large rocks so affixing a grid would be a pain. Right now I also want to play with lay out without the limitations of squares. For instance, in one 4 x 10 bed, I have tomato plants going down the middle, bordered by onions which will then be bordered by something else. The bed's are being filled with a modified Mel's Mix.

My roses are supposed to arrive next week! I've been so excited about them coming and the gallicas are going in the kitchen garden/potager. As soon as those are in, I'm hoping to post some pictures :)

Ditto what tishtoshnm said! Mel would say that I am not square foot gardening because I do not have a grid and did not use Mel's mix (I used straight compost in my beds). They are raised beds, but they are deeper than the typical 6" for SFG.

I, too, used the SFG spacing as a reference. I have similar little squares of radishes! I can't believe how quickly they grow. Allegedly, my 'Cherry Belles' will be ready to harvest in 6 days. Thanks for posting. I like how you have the grids free-floating in the beds. If I ever create grids, you can bet I'll be borrowing that idea!

Lisa

I guess I am like alot of you. I use a bit of this style and that style. This is just my second year with my potager so it's still a work in progress, but I finally figured out how to get pictures on the web, so I am including a link here for you to see.

As for Square Foot gardening, I'd say that I do use a good many principles from it, though not all. I did not make Mel's mix. I had two horse trailer loads of composted horse manure delivered and I worked that into my incredibly tight native clay along with compost, leaves, and any other organic material I could get my hands on. Each time I plant a new crop (3 times a year), I add more manure and compost to the beds.

This spring I have been digging peat moss into the beds, per Mel's advice. I believe it is helping the soil to stay moist longer. We are already hitting into the nineties everyday and the soil in my raised beds dries out pretty fast.

I was pleasantly surprised last year to see just how much food I could grow in such small areas, but it does make it doubly important to supply plenty of nutrition and water.

I am already learning important lessons this year. Our warm early March seduced me into planting too early. After several weeks of watching tomatoes, squash and cucumbers sit there and not grow, I pulled them out and replanted. I am now the proud owner of many marble sized green tomatoes! :) NEXT YEAR I will plant a couple of tomatoes in pots early on and wait until my new soil thermometer tells me the ground has warmed to 70 degrees before putting plants in the ground.

Here is a link that might be useful: Second spring in my potager

Donna- Your potager is beautiful! The beds are so well done and I really like the entry...very pretty roses :)

Your bench looks so nice...are you planning to plant anything to grow over the top? It's just a lovely garden!

Donna,

Lovely!! The terraced beds are so nice, as is the wooded backdrop.

Some of our plants struggled in the early spring too. We waited until after Mother's Day to plant, but this year that rule really didn't apply. Each year we learn a little bit more, don't we?

Here is a link that might be useful: Come see what we've been up to in the garden.

Whoops! Here's a link that works:

Here is a link that might be useful: Come see what we've been up to in the garden

Actually, there are some things planted around the bench now, but they are in their infancy: Ivory Jade Euonymous bushes flank it (they look terribly far away for now, but will fill in fairly soon), a Madame Emile Mouillere Hydrangea is behind it, and I actually have purple hyacinth beans planted beside it to climb, but they're not climbing yet. If they don't get to it this week, I'll be planting something else. I hope next year to locate Arabella clematis to train over the bench, but everyone but Wayside was sold out this year. I'd rather wait a year than start with a four inch pot.

The woodland backdrop is also a work in progress. You can (barely) see an edging of korean boxwood along the dry stream which I started from cuttings. It'll take 2 to 3 years for them to grow in to size. The pink deutzias were divisions I made this spring from one overgrown shrub. I have tons of compact Nandina in a another bed that need a new home, so hopefully in the next couple weeks, they will be mixed into that planting too. You know how it is...in gardening there is no finished, only progress. :)

What a neat potager! The way you terraced the beds made the whole area usable.

I, too, was seduced by a overwarm weekend. My poor tomatoes and eggplants. I had to pull off a lot of wind/cold burned leaves. I'm happy to say that they're looking much better.

I started with square foot gardening in my raised beds. It worked very well. I do some this way still,but this year with my annuals and statice in the beds by my greenhouse.
However,I like green beans in closely sown rows.

I did a diamond design in another raised bed by my greenhouse witn purple ruffles/purple opal basil for one "v" and spicey globe basil for the opposing "v" so it looks like the spicy globe is going through the purple. Then in diamond spaces this makes, I planted annual statice...each diamond is a different statice. Anxious to see how it turns out.

lily- I like that idea of offsetting the v-pattern. I may need to borrow that one.

Last year, I did Genovese basil and Purple Opal alternating on the diagonal in one of my lettuce beds. When the lettuce was done, the basil took over. I only grew basil in pots before and couldn't believe how big they grew. My Italian grandmother was giddy when she saw it and took home a whole bag full of it.

Last fall, I planted three beds in patterns for the winter. The key is to use plants with colored foliage, which, for me, are basically only available in the cool months: lettuces and greens (Kale, collards, etc.) I planted the beds in diagonal stripes. They were very pretty. I will definitely try it again this year.