Gardening, oh my!

My Square Foot Garden on the pool deck.

I got into home-based organic micro-gardening in 2010, having grown up with large farming gardens in Kentucky.  I wanted to try Square Foot Gardening, so I bought the book, built my garden and mixed the organic soil.  I setup the garden on our pool deck in an effort to avoid the bugs and some other perils of central Florida, but spent way too much effort to manually pollenate the plants.  I really like the Square Foot Garden method, and plan to continue using it until I can learn a better way to grow food. The amount of work is much less than traditional row gardening usually takes, and you can plant a garden for the available free time you have.  You may check out the SFG website here.

Square Foot Gardening book

We mostly grew lettuce, spinach, kale and Swiss chard very well, plants which didn't need much help to get started.  I tried growing several varieties of tomato with no luck at all; broccoli, summer and winter squash, and bell pepper all failed horribly; oregano and basil actually did so well they took over; carrots tasted great but looked deranged and my beans never sprouted.  So much for my green thumb.
In 2013, I am planting the winter garden with my brother-in-law Julian, who can grow just about anything and who now lives close by.  This will be a little late to plant for the Florida season, but I hope to grow some salad greens before it gets too hot.  I'm sticking to growing two plantings of romaine lettuce weekly with one spinach and kale plant for the whole season.  One square will be planted with herbs, starting with one basil and oregano plant each.  My goal is to harvest two full heads of lettuce weekly and pull leaves from my other plants as needed.

Planting seed planner with dates

I think Julian is planning for growing lettuce also.  We each will have 8 squares of the garden to work with to start.  If this works out, we'll build more gardens and work from there in the fall.  I do have a full compost barrel of fresh soil and several five-gallon buckets of pre-mixed soil ready to work with, plus the good soil in the current garden and numerous empty containers of various sizes.
I started growing my seeds in the nursery on 2/9/13, and if they survive the latest cold snap, I'll be ready to transplant once we get the garden moved outdoors.

Seeds started in my nursery

The plan is to setup the garden outside, in our back yard.  We will remove the grass from a 4 foot square area, lay down landscaping cloth and cover that with mulch.  The garden frame will sit above the ground on bricks.  It has a plywood bottom to hold the soil inside.  This will keep it above the water when it rains.
Julian and I will build a removable, wood framed, chicken-wire screen shelter.  This shelter will be two feet high by four feet square, and is designed to protect the plants from birds, squirrels and other critters.  Plans for this screen shelter are in the Square Foot Gardening book.  The screen will fit securely on top of the garden and will be easy to remove.  We will not mount the homemade trellis since we are not growing anything that needs it this winter.
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Happy Gardening!