Aloha Military Life: Square Foot Gardening

We have a really small back yard, but wanted to grow our own produce. Square foot gardening is just the thing if you don't have much space ... or even if you a a ton of space! It's really easy to start one. Here in Hawaii, growing season is year round but you'll just need to plant accordingly with your climate and season.

What you'll need:

Two 1x6x8 or 2x6x8 pieces of wood, cut in half. You can have them cut at the store for no charge.
Good, quality soil. It's recommended that you mix 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite.
Garden twine
Wire trellises if you're planning on growing any vine variety plants
Deck screws or nails
... and of course, seeds!

Be sure to pick a spot in your yard that gets 6-8 hours of sunlight. Also, if you're planning on having more than one square foot garden, leave room for aisles between each box.

After you put the box together, place it in the yard and start weeding that area.

Fill it in with your soil, or soil mixture

You want to divide the 4x4 garden into 16 squares. A different veggie/herb can go in each square, or you can have multiple square of the same plant. Each square is 1ftx1ft, so you should have 3 nails or screws on each side of the garden. You can check out the Square Foot Garden Website to look at plant spacing.

It should look like this:

Tie off your garden twine to finish the grid. Place your wire trellises if you're using them. Make sure to situate them so that they won't block sunlight for the other plants!

You can make labels too. I'm sure there are tons of different ways to do this. I also wanted mine water-proofed. I tore strips of notebook paper and labeled them. Then, making sure the strips of packing tape were twice as long as the paper, I place the label side down on the sticky side of the tape. I folded the tape over the twine and then trimmed the edges.