Square Foot Vs Wide Row Gardening

With the economy taking a down turn, most people are trying to find ways to save money. Home gardens are becoming a very common hobby. More and more people are gardening to not only pass the time but also to save some money. A garden is farily easy thing to put in your yard, but before you do it might be worth while to look at a few options.

Square foot gardening is a great option for those with a small garden and only a few hand tools to work with. Mel Bartholomew wrote Square Food Gardening which is a gardening idea he created that is practiced by a wide range of people.

The amazing thing is the amount of food you can get from a four by four foot area. The idea behind square foot gardening is that it eliminates the need to have a rototiller or other specialized equipment. You should only really need a shovel and rake to get a basic garden bed. This can be made even simpler by create raised beds and then adding your soil.

Square foot gardening helps you to save seed and water, whcih are the principles at the core of this practice. You are not planting a ton of seed and then thinning as you do in traditional planting, instead you plant one seed at a time and have seeds left over for next year. When stored in a cold dry location seeds can be saved year to year.

If you have a larger garden and have a rototiller then consider wide row gardening. This is a bit opposite from square foot gardening. In this gardening philosophy you drown out the weeds by over planting your garden in wide rows. This helps to save you time and energy you would normally have to spend weeding. You can get a large yield from wide row gardens because you thin it as your eat. When carrots and onions start to get too dense, you pick them and eat them. The younger food is rich flavored and very enjoyable. This keeps your food from going to waste. The Joy Of Gardening by Dick Raymond is a great book to learn more about this style. Learn from the experts when ever you can to help avoid the pit falls that may occur to a first time gardener.

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