When I first moved to the Dawg Ranch I began free browsing at Book People looking for ideas to return to gardening on my modest little spot and bought the Square Foot Garden book which emphasized "twice the yield in half the space". Right up my alley. When I finished my first fall season I sent them my best pictures to include on their neighborhood gardens section and they asked me to illustrate a comic book designed for instruction to aid teachers in third world countries to help people to learn to be self sufficient before western civilization addicted them to grocery stores and handouts. A noble endeavor …… and I began sketching and submitting ideas shown here.

For most third world countries it was called a square meter garden broken in to nine squares, in the US it was sixteen square feet. Any material at hand that can contain soil when watered and is not chemically treated will work. After two complete years I would recommend cinder block with the holes filled with dirt you can water like the garden just to keep the soil temperature down in the boiling Texas summers. I didn't start that way and now plan to bank my wood frames with soil for the same cooling purpose. Line the bottom of the container with newspapers to kill the grass below it before filling with the mix. It will decay and let roots grow into the soil below when you plant perennial herbs that grow very deep roots over the years. Except for root crops, 6" should be enough depth other wise.

120° = 8 HOURS

Thinking about talking to people whose lives are much closer to the nature of the earth than I have learned to be and so far from the time bound culture watches represent, I dreamed up the scheme for locating zones in ones yard that will get eight hours of sunlight without the use of a watch. Eight hours is a third of a day and a third of the sun's orbit is 120° so that any where you can see 120° on the east to west line without a tree or building or other obstruction coming into view of the sky will get at least eight hours of sunlight, no clock needed. Often elevating the garden can gain hours if the horizon is close enough to make a significant change in the first or last angle of the sun. 1 hour equals 15° Winter throws all kind of longitude factors into the mix as the angle of the sun and the loss of leaves change everything seen in summer. Observing a years cycle of the sun and environmental shadows is the only formula I advise for year round sunny garden.

One of the most ingenious parts of the Square Foot Garden idea is that you don't need to do endless adjustments to the soil in your yard because you are going to fill a six to twelve inch deep, four foot square container full of a mix the author dubbed Mel's Mix: a mixture in equal parts of peat moss, coarse grain vermiculite and organic compost. A six inch deep bed would require eight cubic feet of the mix, or two and a third cubic feet of each ingredient. In essence you are growing your garden in potting soil, the richest, easiest mixture for root growth know outside hydroponics.

The planting translates the row distance for final growth on the seed packet into the square foot so that a six inch distance would be four plants per square foot, or four inch distance would be nine or 3X3 seed plantings, no thinning, no wasted seeds.

My two years of experience has got me into deepening my beds to at least twelve inches just from watching six inches become only four as the plants use the compost to build their bodies and the soil begins to compress from watering by the end of a season.

The white stripes are slats from a defunct venetian blind that I used to define the square feet and because it helps make the garden look good when it grows in. The 2x2 corner posts began because I found a pile of them in a scrap heap used them to anchor the corners and just never cut them off. They now prove to be good to support cat proof netting and screen shading on blistering Texas summer days. or to support verticle growth when crop rotation requires it.

This is an example of the benefits of vertical growing of vining plants like squash and melons. The best and biggest always seem to be way off the ground.

CROP ROTATION
In the individual vegetable pages (yet to be completed) there will be a discussion about companion planting, beneficial crop rotation and plants that attract good bugs and scare off bad ones. Suffice to say here that one shouldn't plant the same family of plant in the same squares more often than every third replant because one species depletes the constituents that another plant replenishes, or at least doesn't need. Ie. peas and beans (legumes) are excellent replenishers of nitrogen and should be grown all over the garden for that reason alone. Seeding clover in areas you plan to let go fallow for any time is another way to replenish the nitrogen content of the garden.

Up to now there has been no science involved because we haven't begun the process of growing until we put seeds in the ground. One could opt for going to a supplier of compost just the same as one must purchase the peat moss and the vermiculite, but to get into the idea of becoming self sustaining, as I am, the learning and maintaining the proper conditions for producing ones own compost from kitchen scraps, yard cuttings, leaf rakings and certain paper waste and animal manure I found to be a worthy thing to learn and do as constantly as watering and weeding. Besides, the garden can always use compost at planting time and through the growing as a suppliment, whereas the vermiculite and moss will not diminish or need to be replenished.

To watch a bin three feet deep with last seasons tomato and pepper plants turn into one foot of black compost in a couple of months is pretty amazing before you understand it, getting an inkling of what's going on in there only makes it more fascinating.

Here are three pages attempting to describe the process of microbial digestion and egestion of the organic material one adds to the pile. If one were willing to turn the pile every three days while maintaining the proper moisture (spongy) and Carbon to Nitrogen ratio (C/N=30:1) the fall leaves and summer grass could be nutritious compost in as little as three months. The construction of the compost container should allow plenty of air circulation. Those microbes are living, breathing, grazing, shitting critters just like the horses in the meadow, but so small that their excretion is fine enough for plant roots to drink in and build a burgeoning garden with. The process is so natural that if all one did was pile the materials in a bin a forget them for a year with enough moisture over the period one could have the same amount of compost without doing anything.

One of the beauties of becoming symbiotic with the natural curve of nature is how if your technique can wait for the cycle for things to occur on their own and fit right in with plans to go with the flow with your own garden purposes.

As an example: The leaves and stems of the tomatoes become part of the compost pile just when it has been harvested to mix into the soil they just came from for the nourishment of the new fall crop to follow. By the time the tomato compost becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the black gold of finished compost, it is time to start havesting and composting the fall-winter garden and revivifying the soil with the new compost from the tomato's generation for the new spring planting. Neat, huh?

The truly wonderful part of this is that if the compost is mixed in a week or two before planting the summer crop and watered as if it had been planted, you will get healthy volunteer sprouts from last years crops that went to seed or dropped fruit, plus other sprouts from kitchen scraps, trees, weeds, and grass. The unwanted sprouts can be eliminated in their infancy and should be no problem through the life of the plant you want to grow in that area. But the healthiest of the volunteer food seeds are perfect for the new season, coming up in their own time. Once one learns to recognize the appearance of the food sprouts, starter cups become unnecessary.

For details about starting and maintaining a compost pile for maximum efficiency for expedient fertilizer harvest click on the chart to the right.

As to the comic book all the foregoing was contributed to: they let me know they decided not to go through with it, thanks for everything, goodbye. I didn't hear from them again until they were hawking a retread of the old book, which I have yet to see.

Here's a picture of my compost pile just after turning it having added some green summer tomato stalks and leaves and balancing weight of leaves. The wire around the top is becoming scalloped where I plop a 30 pound pitchfork full of organic material and give it the crumbling, rapid twisting motion that causes the clod break into particles and remix and aerate the pile. Despite the pretty pictures I made for the ideal compost container on the computer, just using this four inch heavy rebar material with the ends of the long horizontal wire projections at one end of the strip bent back to hook onto the other end at any vertical bar desired so the pile can be maintained at any depth by adjusting the diameter.

This is my compost harvester, dirt filter and pea gravel mining machine. It a box made of sturdy 2x8s and heavy duty 1/4" mesh wire supported by a layer of 1/2 mesh screen with which I get the multi-purpose of screening pure black gold organic compost as needed from the compost pile at turning times for the garden, refine the dirt I add to the raised gardens by separating out the pea gravel surface once used to cover the ground of a junk yard. The first foot below the surface of the Dawgranch is an auto part landfill with a pea gravel cover. Beneath that is wonderful river bottom soil.

I have used the excess dirt from digging my pond to supplement the depth of the gardens in good mix with the Mel's Mix ingredients above since I found the mix to be a bit insubstantial to keep a four or five foot pepper plant upright even with a cage.