Square Foot Garden 2Image by kmvinther via Flickr

Does size matter when it comes to starting your own garden in your backyard? Well if you learn to start a garden in such as way as to make the best use of your available space then no size doesn’t matter so much.

It truly amazing me when I remember back to weeding the garden as a kid. It didn’t amaze me then but today when I think back to how huge our garden was and how much wasted space there was I am sure they wasted far more than half the space they had.

Now I am not saying that was a bad thing. We lived on a 100 acre farm and had plenty of room to waste space but today we live in cities and towns and it can be quite costly to have extra space to just waste.

My wife and I bought the property we now own along with the lot beside it specifically for starting a vegetable garden. We are now converting a big part of that second lot into flower gardens. What??

Well Jenny and I have been learning about square foot gardening, which my wife and I refer to as square metre gardening as we are proud Canadians, and see the benefits. Now we don’t need nearly the space we thought we did.

We have also been using containers for some of our vegetables because it allows us to move them around so they get the best possible growing conditions. Last years, crop of tomatoes was great, this year we will have even more varieties.

This year we are even planting our potatoes into big containers, it’s going to be an interesting summer I believe and most likely a learning experience.

So if you are thinking size does matter when it comes to starting a garden in your backyard you might want to think again and check out container gardening as well as square foot gardening.

We are so excited about our vegetable gardens this year. We decided to go with two square foot gardens. Each are 4 feet square with a strip of lawn between them wide enough to mow. They should look great.

SFG tend to make it easier to reach into the center of each garden for weeding, adding compost or harvesting. Plus if for any reason we need to erect a fence to protect against unwanted critters it won’t take long as the gardens are small and compact.

By the way the major point that attracted us to SFGing is the lack of weeds.

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