Customer Reviews

All New Square Foot Gardening

5 star:		(300)
4 star:		(64)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I've square-foot gardened for a number of years (mostly following the statutes of Mel's original book), and last season, upon moving to a new house, I made raised beds based on Mel's all-new method in this book. My thoughts almost exactly match those of reviewer S. L. Hutchison in his May 19, 2006 Amazon user review of this book entitled "Great concept but keep in mind..." It's a review worth reading.

The two things I would add to Hitchison's review are:
1. In many ways this "All New" book lacks a lot of the scope and detail of the original book. The old book seemed a bit more balanced and complete in the range of specific plants discussed, for instance. While I now follow the "rules" of this new book, I occasionally refer back to the old book for specific plant info, etc., not included in the new book. If you can buy a cheap used copy of the original book along with this new one, I don't think you'll regret it.
2. The editing on this new book was lacking. Some of the information is redundant, and some information in the planting charts is obviously incorrect--information "copied and pasted" into the wrong plant's section, etc. Nothing that will ruin your garden, but enough to leave me feeling cautious about the info. in the book as I read onward.

All in all, I like Mel's improvements to square-foot gardening, and I'm very glad he has written this book.

By a happy accident, I stumbled upon the 1982 copy of Square Foot Gardening. I was very pleased with his concept. However, having a full acre but not a tiller, I was even more pleased when I came across his All New Square Foot Gardening. "What an ingenious method!" thought I. No $50 fee for a tiller and borrowing a truck and all that mess! That's until I tried to actually put it into practice. Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic concept, and it works very well and you should get this book if you want to garden smarter not harder, but there are a few hiccups I wanted other readers to know about before they got started.

For those of you who have not perused the book or are familiar with the new method, I'll sum it up for you: you build these four by four boxes--no tilling required--cover the bottom with weed blocker material, and then fill it with a particular mix that Mel says works like a dream. The boxes are easy, the method is brilliant, but the mix was a different story. 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite, agricultural gauge, which means chunky bits of vermiculite, not fine.

Everything was going smoothly until we tried to find vermiculite. We checked all the Home Depot type megastores, the little stores, gardening supply, everything he says to do in the book, to no avail. When we did find it at a pool supply company, we were informed we would have to pay $125 shipping to get it here from Atlanta. Online did not prove much better because we are growing a garden to save money, not spend more.

Finally, we had to settle for the fine stuff from a pool supply company which was pretty fine grade, but made the most luxurious and easy to work with soil I have ever seen. It was worth the search, but here's the problem I had:

Now Mel addresses the vermiculite availbility on his website, saying that it is now available in Utah, with no shipping. Utah, huh? No problem! Except we live in Memphis. When we wrote the website explaining our trouble finding it at a reasonable cost, we did get a quick reply (to all our questions, btw) and they sent us a pre-formatted response telling us to check at the home supply mega-stores because he's never found one that didn't carry it. My question is if it's everywhere then why have the pre-formatted response? And when he addresses finding a substitute, says that yes, you can substitute perlite (which is much easier to find) but he says don't do it because it makes him sneeze, it doesn't hold moisture as well as vermiculite, and he doesn't like the way that it feels or how it makes the garden look.

Well. Aren't we a just a bit Martha. Lemme just write that check for $185 to the pool supply with the agricultural grade.

So that being said, why did I give it five stars? Because other than finding the vermiculite--which we finally did in fine grade for $28 for four boxes--I've rarely seen a more reader-friendly book! It comes complete with layout pages, very consise planting guides, even planting time tables for your area and the amount of time you can store your seeds! If you have never gardened before or started a garden that eventually left you frustrated, then this is the book for you! I just think that you should check your area for agricultural grade vermiculite before you buy the book. But once that little snafu is over, you are going to be amazed at how brilliant and easy this book makes successful gardening.

I highly recommend this method for busy people and parents like myself. It is wonderfully easy to maintain, makes loads of produce, and looks very attractive. Two green thumbs way, way up.

To see my boxes and my experience with the All New Square Foot Gardening method, check out my frugal/tipping blog at http://moness.typepad.com.

I rarely buy books, to be honest--it's a matter of money + space - great library = few purchases. However, I have bought several copies of this book because this method is superb: it's neat, it's clean, it's extremely--and I mean extremely--easy to manage. This is--by far--the easiest, best-laid out, user-friendly books I have EVER seen, complete with charts, pictures of each step--you name it. And personally, as a frugalholic, I love a book where someone who doesn't have to worry about cost remembers that other people do--Mel writes this for the frugal at heart complete with LOTS of money-saving tips!!! This book is SO thoughtful it even carries a plan for rooftop gardening and handicap accessibility! It is well worth your money even if you choose another method like lasanga or traditional rows (but why??? My goodness--never again!!!)

It calls for you to--basically--container garden in a four by four foot space and unlike the original square foot method, you do NOT have to til.

Repeat: no tilling. That should cause you to one-click right there. You use a specially made soil called "Mel's Mix". Wonderful stuff. It calls for 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 agricultural grade vermiculite in these very easy to construct 4 x 4 boxes, which are easy to cover, protect, and even make into mini-greenhouses if the need arrises.

The one little caution I want to give is please be aware that the vermiculite is not as easy to find as the author seems to think it is and check in your area before making any real plans. I wound up buying a fine grade from a pool supply company, and then after the fact was informed by an older gardener that I should have looked at the co-op. Start there first, and make sure you always ask if it's agricultural grade. The fine works great for us, but the large pieces will break down over time and work at greater efficiency longer. And remember, you're looking for 40 pound bags, not the little $3 numbers at the home improvement store--that will break the bank before you get the first plant in and the author--again to his credit--recommends avoiding this costly route.

Be sure and stop by the website, squarefootgardening.com for a great in-depth view of the method--it's a great site and includes a gardening plan for home-schooled children. Mel is a friendly author and one truly gets the impression that he is doing this because he loves it and the advantages this type of gardening can give the average joe (who usually has planting fever in the spring and burns out by the summer) and not because it sells gardening books. You would be well-advised to purchase this book--it'll change your view of gardening forever--in a good way.

I have recieved several questions on my blog about purchasing this book, all of which are answered at moness.blogspot.com, all of which were posted in March of 2006, and I include our progress as well. One of which is no--don't buy the old book at a cheaper price. They are apples and oranges, and after having read both, this is far and away the best way to go.

Did I mention no tilling?

While this is a practical and fun way to garden which I am implementing myself this year, I have to say a few things have NOT been as easy as the book made it sound:
1. The author suggests mixing all the bed ingredients on a tarp with another person, then dragging it to the beds. I found that just the ingredients for one 4 x 6 bed were too heavy to lift and drag with my son, and was thankful I hadn't tried to mix all my beds at once as suggested (wouldn't have fit on the tarp anyway). You're going to need real strong help with this part. I next tried just mixing the stuff in the beds but that was difficult too. If you are not a football player or are working alone, getting these beds filled is going to be a bigger challenge than you would guess from your reading. I also found it took more material to fill my beds than the book suggested, but then I noticed the peat moss and vermiculite bags and bales I bought were not quite as big as the book suggests; those sizes simply weren't available in my area, apparently.
2. Vermiculite is hard to find and expensive, though I agree it's probably worth it. I've only found it at Agway so far and I live in a fairly agricultural area.
3. I could definitely have used a little more specific help with the compost. It usually comes in 30 lb or 40 lb bags -- would it have been so hard to suggest how many would probably make up the amount needed for one 4 x 4 bed? I feel I've pretty much had to eyeball this one, which has meant extra trips to the store. The instruction to use five different types is a pain too, since most stores around here carry the same three options, including humus that is surely very similar in make-up to the peat mosse. The author appears to live in some sort of retail compost & vermiculite paradise.
4. Raised beds are not necessarily ideal for drought, which we had here in early spring (that has since reversed itself big time). The beds dry out so quickly I'm not sure it would even be safe to leave them for a weekend. I would think people in chronically dry areas might want to modify the mix so it's not quite so light, or dig their square foot beds DOWN, not up. (Not easy, I know.)
5. This book must have been rushed through editing; two sections on basil that say pretty much the same thing are clearly redundant.
On the plus side, the approach makes a lot of sense as a way to cope with poor soil, and advice about the individual plants is very good too. Just make sure that if this is for your poor old Grandma, she gets a lot of strong help (and some extra $$) to get it going.

I LOVE this new, updated version of the classic Square Foot Gardening book. Lots of pictures, charts, and visuals. This version has suggestions for protecting the plants from critters of all kinds as well as ideas for hoop houses to extend the gardening season. The book is full color and much easier to read than the older version. Even if you already have the original book, the new one is worth buying. He's added some updated information based on 25 years of sqft gardening experience from around the globe. The website is also interesting as it contains photos and such of square foot gardens from all over the world.

I started my first square foot garden last year with the help of Mel's original book. I made raised bed boxes using information from his website and loved the results. I was so excited about his new book that I pre-ordered and counted the days until it arrived. The new book is amazing! I love the colored photos, diagrams and just the overall readability. The omission of all the information about soil improvement, etc is welcome since those steps are no longer necessary. Our soil is exceptionally rocky, so using Mel's mix makes gardening possible without hours of backbreaking labor.

My only complaint about the new book is that the information about growing, harvesting, and preparing specific vegetables from the first book was not included. New information was added for some herbs, flowers, and strawberries, but the profiles for zucchini, carrots, beans, etc. were left out this time. This was the part of the book that I had found most helpful. As a rookie gardener, I need all the help I can get. Even though this omission makes this book less than perfect, it is excellent in every other way. Their website is an excellent resource to use in combination with the book and they actually answer your emails! It is nice to know that if you have a question, you can get an answer straight from the author.

Overall, I love this new and improved version of Mel's book and highly recommend it.

So far, the book has been very useful in our planning of our garden. We are about two weeks from planting the seedlings. The boxes have been built and filled with Mel's Mix. They've also successfully survived their first drenching spring rain. So far so good!

Here are some things to keep in mind when you are building and filling your boxes.

* Mel is very vague in terms of how MUCH of the various items you need for his mix. Yes, each box required 8 cubic feed of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. But what does that work out to in actual bags? He doesn't say. So here's some rough guidelines based on what we used. For EACH 4x4 garden, you need 2.67 cubic feet each of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. 1 bale of peat moss is roughly 3.7 cubic feet, so you're only going to need about 70% of the bale. As far as we could tell, peat moss in bales seems to have standardized in the 3.7 cf size. The largest bag of horticultural vermiculite bags we could find were 2 cubic feet. (Interestingly, the Lowe's told us they can't get vermiculite due to asbestos issues, which is exactly what Mel mentioned. We got ours at a smaller garden supply store.) The store we got the bags at said these were the largest bags available. So you're going to need at least 1 bag. Finally, the compost. The typical compost bag is 40lbs. We estimated 5 bags of compost per box, so we bought 10 bags altogether and ended up using just 7. We know our mix is not perfectly equal in terms of the constituent parts, so we'll see how well we did.

* Do NOT try to drive 4" coarse screws into 2x6 posts with a 9V driver drill or smaller. I ended up buying a 14.4V driver and even that was challenged at times. If you have an 18V driver, you should be fine.

* You don't have to use weedblock sheets. We ended up using some painting plastic we had laying around. We stapled the plastic to the frame and sliced long slits at random places.

* To further kill the grass and weeds, we laid down old cardboard from moving boxes. They are water porous so figured we wouldn't experience flooding. It seems to have worked.

* 18" rebar is roughly $1.60 per.

* We're going to construct a PVC pipe framework to protect the plants from squirrels and the like. Buying chicken wire is probably going to be the most expensive part of this exercise.

Hope this was helpful - I know I was going nuts trying to figure out how much stuff to buy to fill the boxes, so if I can save someone from the same pain, I will be happy!

I'm an advanced gardener and have been gardening for many years. I came across this book last year and decided to take it for a spin. I already used raised beds, but I built more using his methods. I followed the book to a "T"
I had the worst harvest this past year. We have just two people and we planted three 8'x4' and one 12'x4' and still didn't produce enough food to meet our needs. The previous year I used the techniques from The Vegetable Gardener's Bible and we had a fantastic harvest.
I also noticed that this year, besides being less fruitful, the plants weren't as healthy and it was the first time we had major insect infestations. This was most likely due to the plants being planted way to close to each other and the soil being deficient in nutrients. I will definitely not use this book again and will be going back to the Vegetable Gardener's Bible.
I'm giving it an extra star because I like the planting schedules in the back and the construction methods for row covers and trellises.

This book is incredible. I've gardened now for over 20 years and got to a point where it wasn't enjoyable anymore - especially my vegetable garden. This book gave me a simple, easy method that yields a tremendous amount in a small space. More importantly, it's made vegetable gardening fun again. Don't settle for the other imitators. Mel is the originator of this method and deserves to profit it from it, not the other copycats. As well, his nonprofit organization is designed to help spread this method across the world and help families in third world countries grow at least some of their own food. Go Mel!! Become part of the population who says no to high priced gardening gadgets, wasted land, water and energy and become a responsible steward of our precious land and resources.

I got the first version from the library and couldn't imagine how it could be updated or improved. AFter reading these reviews I bought the update and I feel it was money well spent. You could certainly get a great garden out of the first book, but if you have a choice between the two, get this one.

I have a small collection of gardening books and this is probably the easiest to read and follow. AFter reading it you wonder why EVERYONE doesn't square foot garden. Yes, he does a fair bit of backpatting (way, way, way more than the first book) but in my opinion this guy is a genius, so why not? Most of these professional gardening types think they know it all and aren't shy about saying so. As far as SFG goes, he DOES know it all so read this book and take advantage of his knowledge and experience.