Back in August, I wrote about my plan to try square foot gardening. In a nutshell, my garden is huge. And it’s hard to keep up with the water requirements and pest management over summer. It means that each year, I lose my gardening mojo as plants die, pick up diseases, or just get attacked by insects.
So, while I have a lot of the same plants in other parts of the garden, I also have one small garden bed where I’m growing everything I want to regularly harvest throughout summer. I’ve set it up with bug protection and irrigation. If everything else fails, then (at least in theory) we’ll still be eating out of here.
The bed is 1.4 x 1.8m. In that space, I am now growing tomatoes, capsicum, basil, coriander, lettuce, mesclun, spring onions, cucumbers, carrots, and a couple of marigolds.
What didn’t work
When I wrote in August, I was writing a plan. And, of course, not everything always goes the way we think it will.
In my plan, I was just going to sow seeds directly, which I did in September. I got absolutely no return on them. Nothing grew. Or if it did, it was wiped out by slugs and snails before I had a chance to see it. Direct sowing was a total failure.
Likewise, it took 3 tries to get my carrots to germinate. Again, slugs and snails may also have been implicated. Transplanting isn’t a great option for carrots as it disturbs the roots too much, so I had to get direct sowing working. This week, I finally succeeded, but they’re definitely running behind schedule.
Then I had trouble sourcing a really big red capsicum plant. I found lots of yellow and orange ones. There were also plenty of chili in a bunch of varieties. But a red capsicum wasn’t happening in the larger grades. I ended up purchasing 2 well-developed 10cm California Wonder plants. Combined with some store credit I’d accumulated, I paid about $4.50 for both plants – a massive saving over what I’d planned.
Finally, some of my seeds were too old and even when I tried germinating them again in a more controlled environment, I didn’t see results. So in some cases (lettuce, rocket, marigolds), I resorted to buying a 6 pack of seedlings and planting them instead.
What did work
Toilet rolls worked! I sowed a lot of my seeds (rocket, lettuces, mesclun, coriander, cucumbers, and basil) in toilet rolls. They worked a freaking treat! When it came time to plant, I chucked the whole thing in. The toilet rolls degrade, and my plants are thriving!



What I changed
I decided I didn’t need chives. I’ve got them growing in another part of the garden where they’re utterly thriving. As a result, I decided to swap out the chives for a second lettuce square. I also ended up planting three tomato plants over two squares. I’m not quite sure why when I planned to plant two, but they’re doing OK so far, so hopefully it stays that way.
How it’s going
The tomatoes are about 40cm high and have begun flowering. Cucumbers/melons have begun taking off and we have our first flowers. The basil was a little slow to start, but I’ve been thinning them out and I have a feeling it’ll take off soon. The lettuces are works of art. As I mentioned above, the carrots have been a problem, but this week they’ve finally begun germinating. I sowed one square under a sheet of plywood, and one as an exposed square. It will be interesting to see the difference between the techniques as time goes on.
What’s next
Turning on the irrigation! You may be surprised to know I haven’t used my carefully set up irrigation yet. I haven’t needed to – the rain’s been pretty great this year. But also it turns out my hose doesn’t reach the garden! I have a plan for fixing that, but in the meantime the bug net seems to be doing a great job creating a microclimate the plants love. There’s a huge difference between plants in the square foot garden and those in the main garden. I can only put that specifically down to the bug net. So far, it’s been enough.