The Magic Garden, The Square Foot Garden

My Dad's Magic Garden

"Wow, dad! Where did you get those amazing tomatoes?"  That's a question we'd often ask my dad when we (me and my two sisters) were young.  And my dad would always say, "Oh, I just picked them from my garden out back."  We'd laugh and say, no really!

We didn't really have a garden or much of an "out back". We lived in a fairly urban neighborhood on a fairly busy intersection.  Well, as fairly urban and as fairly busy as Green Bay, Wisconsin gets.  We had a very tiny yard, though it sure seemed huge and magical growing up.  But there was no garden... that we could see.

So maybe my dad only had access to this invisible garden in our backyard or maybe it was a tomato stand down the street.  He always stuck to his story.  This garden also produced watermelons, apples, and pineapples on occasion.

Instant Garden, Insanity Garden

Fast forward a couple decades later.  It was early July 2007 when my 8 months pregnant wife and I just moved into our first home.  It came equipped with a nice 20' x 40' row garden with lots of tomatoes, beans and peppers.

We had a bumper crop that year.  The next year I kept that garden going and we did pretty well -- even adding red potatoes into the rotation.

Our baby girl helped out with the harvest the following year...

Then we had a boy.  Followed shortly thereafter by another boy.  And as our family grew, our garden started growing more weeds than anything else.  We just couldn't maintain it and our sanity.

And so we had an amazing fenced in garden of weeds, featuring some of the largest dandelions you've ever seen.  I hope our neighbors mistook them for rare breed of sunflowers.

By fall of 2014 I decided enough was enough.  The wooden fencing of the garden was becoming as much of an eyesore as the weeds.  I dismantled the fencing, cleared the weeds and planted grass.

Square Foot Garden

Over that winter I read up on the square foot gardening technique that my friend Erik used in our Great Garden Off competition. The basic concept of the square foot garden is to use space more efficiently than traditional methods. Instead of wasted room between rows of crops, the garden area is maximized — you get the most vegetables, fruits and flowers in the smallest amount of growing space.  It's also known as raised bed gardening and uses a square foot grid to divide the crops.

I liked the idea of this garden's sustainability in my increasing busy world.  I wanted the kids to have a more tangible garden than I did growing up.  And so this Memorial Day weekend (the official kick off of most Wisconsin gardening), we planted our very first square foot garden.

The "Smartest Garden"

This blog is so-named the "Smartest Garden" not to toot my own corn (actually, I didn't plant any corn).  I'm definitely not the smartest gardener.  But the smartest garden is the garden that you plant and that works for you.  A garden that fits your lifestyle, enhances your life, and benefits your family. and friends (who doesn't like it when co-workers bring in extra produce).

I probably won't be able to harvest the pineapples like my dad was able to in his garden, but I'm hoping for tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas and cukes.  I'll be passing on any smart gardening tips to you along the way.  I hope you'll do the same for me.