We constructed a 4′ by 4′ (sorry, 1.2m by 1.2m – old habits die hard, and gardening was always done with my parents in Imperial measurements) bottomless box today and set it on a former flowerbed, to become the first of our square foot gardens. The official square foot garden method says to fill the box with a mixture of peat moss, coarse vermiculite, and compost; since I’ve read that the current stores of peat moss in the world are holding as much carbon dioxide as the rain forests, it seems like a good idea to skip that and go for a closed-system approach in our backyard garden. We turned over the soil in the box and added the compost from the composter, and planted in that.
There’s, of course, not much that can be planted now, but we planted a square each of peas, spinach, and beets, and half a square of radishes.
Most of the point of growing vegetables is to be environmentally friendly, so we’re relying on scavenged materials. The sides of the box are leftover siding material from the shed, and the grid strips are from old lattice I pulled apart.
You can just see the tulips coming up on the left-hand side of the picture – I hope the squirrels don’t eat them until after they bloom, this year.
