As promised, we’ve put together a little video about square-foot gardening and have aggregated some resources for you here. This approach to growing food is especially designed for garden boxes, but can be applied to in-ground planting as well – pretty much anywhere you are growing and can apply a grid with 1′ x 1′ sections.  In our case, we’ve built two 3′ x 4′ garden boxes using 2″ x 8″ planks of non-pressure-treated pine.

You’ll want to put a layer of something between the ground where you place your box and soil you will use to fill it. Weed cloth is the most reliable answer, but we also suggest cardboard or even newspaper to help block weeds from coming up through your fresh planting soil. Fill each box with a nice mix of loamy soil and organic material. While there are different ways to approach this mix (we go with a 60% loamy topsoil to 40% compost mix), here is a great approach that we found online!

There are a lot of square foot gardening plans online, many of which are very good. We’ve provided the grids we used for our boxes, here. The thing you will want to remember when using a square foot plan from online is to cross reference those plans with a companion planting chart to ensure that you are putting plants together that can benefit one another. The best companion planting chart we know of comes from our friends at the Farmer’s Almanac!

For more resources, be sure to check out our last gardening post!