Square Foot Gardening Demo Boxes

As a homeschooler wanting to do backyard gardening in a 50' x 50' area, square foot gardening is the best way to go. Check out Mel Bartholomew's ergonomic system at http://www.squarefootgardening.com.

This video shows the first garden beds designed during this experiment in urban gardening.

Transcript:

OK. What I am going to introduce to you is some square foot gardening things that I have been doing. We homeschool and one of the things we started to do as homeschoolers was do square foot gardening by Mel Bartholomew. And this little box here was my original demonstration model. We would take this to little group functions where we would demonstrate the square foot gardening. This is like a little bitty two foot by two foot garden and it was easy to demonstrate. However in practical use out in the back yard it would dry out quickly. Very high maintenance. Not very good.

0:42
So I built another model for demonstration purposes. And that would be this. It had the ability to have the netting for climbing vines. I could wheel it around like a wheel barrow. It was more practical as far as demonstrating but again it would dry out quickly in real use in the backyard.

1:06
So I decided to put a little water reservoir on the bottom. I just used black plastic, as you can see it here, (1:14 ) to line the inside of that little box underneath. And then I drilled a big hole for a two liter pop bottle and some holes in it. I inserted it down in there and piled dirt on top of all of that. That would wick the water up in there. I would not have to water it so much and it would not dry out quick. Right? Well it still dried out and it still did not do so good. Had to keep filling the reservoir until I put the plastic liner in the upper level and that did the trick. So that was my first experiment in square foot gardening with the water reservoir.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• square foot garden
• water reservoir
• bed garden
• cistern garden
• wicking well