Square Foot Gardening

Today I finished Mel Bartholomew's "All New Square Foot Gardening". I read this book because the hubby and I are planning on creating a vegetable garden this spring. Since we want to keep our backyard as open as possible for the kids and our soil is mostly clay, we wanted to go for raised beds. A friend of mine recommended Mel's book and he was on the local news about two weeks ago so I thought I would give it a try.

Although some of the book sounds "infomercial" like, the information is really helpful and easy to understand. I do wish that the instructions for building the raised bed had more pictures showing construction, but it seems easy enough. I wish I skipped the first two chapters though because they basically tell the story of how square foot gardening began and how Mel's foundation has helped others. The second chapter talked about improvements to the book/method compared to the first book that was published in 1981 and the reprint in 2005.

The whole book makes me even more excited about planning my garden this spring. One of the recommendations that I really appreciated was to start small - start with the vegetables my family eats on a regular basis. I'm glad for that reminder because I was starting to get carried away with ideas for crops.

One thing I wish to have seen in the book would have been a layout to scale that the reader could use to plan out their own garden - something on CD-ROM would have been a great addition or even something like that on the website would have been a nice addition.

I can say I would recommend this book to urban and suburban gardeners, but I can't go further than that since I have yet to try Mel's methods myself. Later this summer I will write an update on how my garden is doing.

If you would like to check out "All New Square Foot Gardening" by Mel Bartholomew, you can purchase it at Barnes and Noble or find it at your local library.