Our Own Little Square Foot Garden..

One of the big things people talk about when they visit our little postage-stamp size lot in Vancouver is our backyard garden. I have spent several years, trying many different methods of growing things, and by August each year, I have an absolutely amazing, large, varied crop of vegetables, berries and fruits that my visitors covet!

In fact, each year, we get requests to help folks build their own high-yield, organic city gardens, and when we can, we happily oblige them, at least in the planning and building. :) Folks ask us often what our secret is to getting so much happening in such a small space, and probably the biggest difference is that we use the 'Square Foot Gardening method', designed by Mel Bartholomew, combined with some crop rotation and soil balancing methods we learned from the resources listed at the bottom of this post.

Each year we learn a little more, and our gardens get even better as we add our lovely compost from our kitchen scraps (as vegetarians, we have a LOT of kitchen scraps!!). I'm going to spend the next few posts, helping you design your OWN postage stamp gardens using what we've learned over the years. If you are planning to get started yourself, the one resource I encourage you to start with is Mel Bartholomews, "All New Square Foot Gardening Book" that is a great place to get started. I will be posting pics of our garden from this late spring-time throughout summer, and explaining what we did and how. Keep watching!