Minimal Weeding: If you use a soilless mix for your square foot gardening, this means there are practically no weeds to pull out during the first season. Watering and fertilizing are easier since there’s no wasting water between the rows. This means you only need to invest a few minutes of your time every day for maintenance. Less Regular Maintenance: Since your garden setup is small, you only need to do a few specific tasks on a daily basis. You can build and fill the bed and start planting seeds or seedlings in just a few hours, with less time and effort. Quick Set-Up: If you want to start a new garden, you’re a first timer, or you have limited room, the square foot gardening set-up is ideal for you. Produces High Yields: Since it’s intensive planting, it means you can harvest a lot, even in a much smaller space. Why Should You Try Square Foot Gardening? Since there are no paths, there is no space wasted and the soil in the bed is loose because no one is walking on it, thereby making it better for your plants roots to branch and make stronger, healthier plants. The seeds or the seedlings of each vegetable of your choice are then planted into the small squares. The concept of Square Foot Gardening is very simple: to create a small garden bed with the size of 4 feet by 4 feet or 4 feet by 8 feet and dividing it into different grids of 1-foot square. This method allows a gardener to produce more food with less effort while maintaining the garden size and optimizing the space. Square Foot Gardening is a simple method which divides a raised plant bed into smaller equal squares, each with a size of roughly one foot in length. The Challenges Of Square Foot Gardening.Why Should You Try Square Foot Gardening?.Harvest Log - use this to keep track of how well your garden did this year so that you can plan for next year.Garden Planner - a scaled grid that helps you to actually plan the layout of your garden.Plant Calculator - lets you know how many of each plant you should plant per person in your family - and when to plant it.Some are best canned using the water bath method, some are best frozen and some foods must be preserved by pressure canning. Preservation Guide - this will let you know what method of preserving is best for the most commonly planted and preserved foods.
Some people may not really need this (if you only have the freezer attached to the refrigerator in your kitchen), but if you are like me and have an additional chest freezer in your garage, it can become easy to lose track of what you have! Freezer Inventory - this serves the same purpose as the pantry inventory.This inventory can also do double-duty as a grocery list for you! If you already have 15 cans of green beans in your pantry (purchased from the store or left over from canning green beans last year), you may not want to plant as many green beans this year (or start menu planning in order to use up what you already have). Pantry Inventory - any good canning plan starts with knowing what you have.Included in this printable garden planner: Gardening is a lot of fun, but if you getting serious about growing your own fruits and vegetables this year, it takes some planning!Įven if you are planning on just growing enough for your family for the summer and not canning your garden bounty, it is important to know how many of each to plant in order to get you through the season (unless you want to be running to the supermarket to supplement your vegetable garden - kind of defeats the point, doesn't it?) With this free printable garden planner not only can you map out your entire garden, but plan for all your canning and freezing needs!