Get your mind out of the manure. That’s P for Plant. My colleague, Sara Hill, brought me freshly picked vegetables from her garden today. Three tomatoes and a yellow squash. Why didn’t Mel (of All New Square Foot Gardening Fame) mention that gardens grow very slowly?

Impatiently yours,

s.

Aw shucks.

Remember how excited I was about purging the extra seedlings? I loved that feeling of plucking and trimming. It felt so nice to get it done while the plants were young. It was easy to see what I was doing, since nothing is very bushy yet.

Well, it turns out that Mel (of All New Square-Foot Gardening Fame) was right. I should’ve snipped the extra seedlings’ stems with scissors. He warned that the roots might be entangled.

Shucks. I should’ve trusted him. I killed a lot of carrots. One more point for Mel.

Ahh.

You know the feeling you get when you clean out your closet? Like really purge it?

That’s what it feels like to thin and weed 66-square feet of garden.

[insert blissful sigh]

I wonder if I should really call it “thinning and weeding.” The square-foot method of gardening (a la Mel Bartholomew fame) is all about minimizing the thinning and weeding. It’s gardening for dummies. It’s gardening for lazy dummies.

Of course I’m not really all that lazy, but I am a little skeptical about this whole “plant it and they will sprout” thing. That’s why I planted 10-12 seeds in every hole, as opposed to the 2-3 that … Read More