The Pros and Cons of Square Foot Gardening

You may have seen many people installing organized raised beds of perfectly cut-out gardens featuring a variety of plants, also known as square foot gardening. These squares look beautiful and can spruce up the look of your home, but the real question is, are they effective? Find out what it means to install a square foot garden and if it is right for you. A lot of this depends on your requirements, budget, space and available resources.

Square foot gardening

This kind of gardening is a simple method of creating small, organized and productive kitchen gardens. Invented by Mel Bartholomew – a backyard gardener and retired engineer. He was looking at an efficient way to grow a vegetable garden and he ended up introducing this idea to the gardening public in 1981.

The idea is to create a small garden bed (4ft by 4 ft or 4ft by 8ft being the most common size) and divide it into a grid of 1-foot squares. These squares will need to be managed individually. You can then plant seeds or seedlings of different kinds in one or more squares. You could either grow an entire bed of tomatoes or a mix of tomatoes, radish and add a few herb plants, here and there. As there is no wasted space and no stepping off the foot, the soil in the bed stays loose. Let’s take a look at its pros and cons.