Almost square foot gardening

Spring is here once again! For the previous two years this has meant

gardening at our large allotment[1,2,3]. Unfortunately, in our new

city of residence these are a scarce resource. They exist, but

instead of being able to rent one this year we had to join an

approximatley three-year long waiting list!

So, this year we are experimenting with something a bit simpler. With

permission from our apartment building's board we've put two small

raised beds in one corner of the communal lawn area. We're going to

try out square foot gardening[4], a kind of high-density gardening

pioneered in the 70s by a retired engineer who sought to remove some

perceived inefficiencies with traditional row-style gardening (which

is what we practiced back when we had a hundred square metres to play

with). None of the pre-made raised beds here divide neatly into

genuine square feet, of course, because they are nice round numbers of

centimetres, so our two beds are each divided into twelve rectangular

sections of 30cm x 26.7cm. I am sure the plants won't mind.

The days are sometimes quite lovely here already, but the overnight

temperatures are still getting down to almost freezing some nights.

Right now we have some seedlings sprouting on our windowsill, to be

transplanted in the near future when it's a little warmer. Hopefully

we'll be successful!

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hobby-farming.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/my-hundred-square-metres.txt

[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/gardening-update.txt

[4] https://squarefootgardening.org/