Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work

Excellent resource for small plot gardening. I never understood why a packet of seeds has the instructions to pour the whole packet into your row and then thin later. It seemed so wasteful! Square foot gardening is EXACTLY the kind of gardening I want to do. The book is loaded with information and diagrams and tables on plants and spacing and growing. I borrowed this from the library; but I will be buying a copy for my permanent library!

This is a very good book for anyone who wants to grow a market garden, even if there is little open ground to do so. By creating squares divided into specific grids, the author provides an easy guideline for would-be gardeners, who want results without too much work. For me, I found his chapters nicely laid out with tidbits on pests, water, soil, and structures.

While I don't use too much square footing as I have plenty garden space, I've seen it in action at a neighborhood open garden, where each owner successfully follows Bartholomew's advice as gospel. His chapter on vertical gardening is eye-opening, so it's hard to go wrong with this book as a basic bible for first-timers.

Book Season = Year Round (each season has its seed)

Makes me want to garden NOW! I swear, I'm sitting here plotting this year's gardening.

A plan to grow in a metre square plot, how to go about doing it, how to build a plot and how to get working on it.

I want to use some of the ideas in my tiered garden.

This is an introduction to square metre gardening, and covers everything from why you'd want to do it, constructing raised beds and accessories to planting them.

I thought it would be a very useful book, but it's written in a really patronising style, and the author makes it sound like he knows everything (perhaps he does, but it didn't come across very well). He also uses peat, which I don't agree with. Although it is written for a British audience, it does read like the author is used to vast spaces for gardens - I thought this was a method for saving space, and it is, but there doesn't seem to be much content for the gardener who can only fit one or two of these raised beds in. It does have very clear illustrations however, and if show more you want to construct raised beds from scratch this would be a good place to start. show less

Time Machine
Simply a Great Gardening Book, February 24, 2005

55 Reviewers pretty much say it all, but I just had to add to the applause. I have used this book as a reference for over 20 years, and have used Mel's methods in the sands of Florida, the gumbo of Texas, and now the 'barely there' soil of Northern Virginia. And what have I gotten... production and ease!

Based in part on the French Intensive method of gardening, you pretty much can avoid the inherent soil problems of where you live and grow veggies and flowers with little weeding and grunting.

Ideas in this book include:

How to prepare the soil (fertilizers, conditioners)

How to put together raised beds and other support structures if you want them

A guide for popular vegetables

-- show more how and when to plant them, including how to start seeds

-- the what-fors of watering

-- common pest and disease problems

In my opinion this easy to read book is a gardening staple good for all levels of experience. show less

I may have learned more useful advice from this little book than on the literally hundreds of books and publications I have read on gardening in the past. Following this method, I built two 16-square-foot garden boxes this summer, and got more produce from that little bit of space than I had gotten in years of gardening the "traditional" way in long, flat, tilled beds.

I highly recommend this book for both novice and veteran gardeners.

A great guide to gardening. Bartholomew gives a nice, enthusiastic outline of square foot gardening with some essential planting tips and time tables. I wish the book went into more technical detail on how to construct the frames and which varieties of crops work well, but overall there's very little to complain about. Got me very excited about gardening.