How to make an easy square-foot garden!

How to make an easy square-foot garden you can put anywhere! Follow step-by-step instructions and learn how to build, fill, mark, and plant your very own square-foot garden.

Remove these ads by Signing Up

Step 1: Plan!

First, make a scale drawing of your garden - a 4"x4" box in a piece of paper. Grid it off every inch so you have 16 little squares inside of 1 big square. Once you decide what veggies you want to grow, use a search engine to find a website for your state/country and find the recommended time to plant and harvest and the spacing for planting your veggies. Leave some space to plant flowers like Dwarf Sunflowers and French Marigolds that keep away pests.

spell check police says: Apr 17, 2012. 4:03 PM

gridded

rukidding says: Mar 3, 2010. 10:50 AM

Here is a link that takes you to a site offering a great & free garden planner that coincides with the square gardening approach.

www.gardeners.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Gardeners-Site/default/Page-KitchenGardenDesigner

roginc says: Mar 5, 2012. 2:37 PM

This is a great link. Thanks for passing it along.

eatlocal says: Mar 16, 2010. 1:36 PM

Nice quick SFG overview. I always plant my lettuce tighter (salad mix anyhow), and always have a nice harvest from a couple s.f. I have a 10' x 10' area and use the Fantastic Farm & Garden Calculator to plan it out. It makes it really easy to figure out succession planting and intercropping, as well as let you know how many people you can feed.

Ninzerbean says: Oct 1, 2009. 5:26 AM

I am getting ready to do this (South FL) and I want to know if you are happy with the size, I mean would you do anything different if you were to build it again? What about the height - are you sure the plants have enough root room with sides only that tall? Thank you for the tip about tall plants in the back, great job.

BigMac96 (author) says: Oct 1, 2009. 1:10 PM

Pick a size that suits the area. With the height, you would need to have different heights for what you're growing. If its just herbs, 4". If you are doing tomatoes (tall plants), maybe 6-8".