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Square Foot Gardening

Book Suggestion

16 years ago

Hello all of you SFGers!

My wife and I are planning to try SFG for the first time this year. I haven't had any success in locating a copy of Lynn Gillespie's Cinder Block Gardens anywhere. Sorry, I refuse to pay $50 for a used book on Amazon. I've checked the local libraries, too. Are the Square Foot Gardener books by Mel Bartholomew just as good or even better than Cinder Block Gardens? I've also seen that Mel Bartholomew has a few different books on the subject. Is any one better than the others?

If you could choose only one book, which one would it be?

Also, do you have any advice or suggestions for two newbies?

Thanks!

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Comments (6)

sinfonian
16 years ago
His latest book is the most current and is most of what you need to start SFG. What you don't find there you can find here and elsewhere on the internet. Good luck finding what you're looking for!

Here is a link that might be useful: Sinfonian's SFG blahg
alages
16 years ago
Another possibility:
http://cinderblockgardens.com/
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Earlier this month my DH went to China for a couple of weeks so we broke down and finally got him a Kindle. Well, it was more like I dragged him kicking and screaming into getting a Kindle. (No, I don't have one but I'd gotten one for my elderly mother and drilled her in how to use it so I knew pretty much all about them.) My husband went from being a reluctant Kindle owner to an avid Kindle owner. He travels a LOT and he was always packing piles of paperbacks in his luggage. Sometimes he'd run out and wind up buying more paperbacks and carting them home. (One reason we quite literally have thousands of them.) He loved just having the Kindle to pack when going to China. He loved that he had 90 books loaded into it. (All but one of them free.) He's in Washington state now and didn't even look at packing paperbacks, just stuck his Kindle in his carryon. As far as the ipad goes, yes it does a lot more than a Kindle does BUT, I wouldn't recommend it for reading for long periods of time. The display screen of a Kindle really does look like a printed page....a printed page taht you can adjust the text size. An ipad or any tablet thing like that will be backlit and while that might make it easier for you to read in a roomw ith no lights, it'll also tire your eyes more....just like reading a computer screen all day.
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gardener_mary
16 years ago
I've had a copy of the older SFG book for many years and love it. I just read the new book, it has a few changes on the original concepts (growing in raised bed, using only mel's mix), it has growing information on a few more vegetables, some herbs and flowers. I did not find it worth buying a copy for my own library. I took a few notes on the plants that I was interested in and returned it to the public library.

In my opinion, the older book is better. Much more information on sun, soil structure, fertilizers and general gardening principals. I found the new book to be much less flexible and about 1 single very structured (but simple) method of gardening. The new book does not repeat the growing information on the basic garden vegetables that are in the first book. I use this section of the book every spring.

good gardening, Mary
snibb
16 years ago
the new book is vastly improved! The old book dedicates a whole chapter on soil composition, fertilizing, etc. Mel boils it down to 3 ingredients now. The old book tells you to dig deep, the new says forget it-build up, not dig down. There is spacing information in the new book in addition to what the old book has. There is new information on things to build to protect your garden that are very different from the original. So, if you don't want to buy the newest SFG book, my suggestion is to check it out at your local library...it does say "new and improved" for a reason...
halfdozendoxies
16 years ago
I found that my local library has the books by Mel so you might try your library for that book.
gardenchad
16 years ago
rcarsone have tried get the book through interlibrary loan.

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