Square Foot Gardening - Part Two

 Part Two of Two of Master Gardener Mark Fierle’s interview with the founder of Square Foot Gardening - Mel Bartholomew.  An engineer by training, Mel researched and developed the Square Foot Gardening method and first published his ideas in 1981.  His book “Square Foot Gardening" went on to become the best selling gardening book in America.  Currently, most home gardeners grow fruits and vegetables in raised beds, and it was Mel ideas that got this method started.  The second part includes some of Mel’s seldom heard stories, tips, and wisdom.  Learn how Square Foot Gardening works so you can get your warm season and cool season gardens growing! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to In the Garden, hosted by UC Master Gardeners. My name is Mark Fairley and I will be your host today. And today we're going to have a special guest on again. Mel was on not too long ago, and Mel is a prolific author, author of the largest selling gardening book in the United States. He is a visionary with a plan to a real plan to help eliminate hunger around the world, and he is working on that. His last recording he talked about his story, how he got started, how his invention of square foot gardening came about and became what it is today, along with giving some dynamics of what square foot gardening is all about. But listen to Mel's first one and then get the real meat here. Mel, welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Mel, we we were we've talked about a number of issues, how what your background is as an efficiency engineer and how you work on making things get better. And I know you've done this with Squarefoot Gardening over the years. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more how Squarefoot Gardening evolved into what it is today. Okay and how you came about writing your new book. Oh yes, more than that.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Yeah, more than that. Actually, after I invented the system, and this was out in Long Island, New York on the North Shore, and it was in a community garden that I ran. Then after that, everyone said, gee, this system really works. And our community garden, instead of being single row gardens filled with weeds all the time, there were no weeds in the garden because we didn't allow them to even start. And we did that by laying down a weed fabric underneath our square foot boxes. Now remember our boxes, the basic size is four feet by four feet for adults. They can walk all the way around the outside and reach in, never walk on their growing soil. And likewise, their raised beds. Yes, a raised bed, yes. We don't dig up our existing ground anymore. We did at the start, just because that's the way everyone did it. But I realized, and and I did this again by experimenting, how deep does the soil have to be to grow certain crops? And I experimented with uh very shallow, like four to six inches, six to eight, eight to ten, ten to twelve, and then over twelve inches deep. And when I was told by the experts at the beginning, oh those roots go really deep. I said, Well, what kind? All of them, they all go deep. Like a tomato that goes so deep. We dug down and they go over three feet deep. And I thought, and I asked, Why are they going so deep? Well, they said they're looking for water and nutrients. And I said, Okay, that uh that's understandable. But what if they had the the moisture or water and the fertilizer or nutrients up in the top six inches? Would they stay up there? And they kind of shook their head. They hadn't tried that before. No, they never even thought of that. Put put their chin in their hand and finally they would say, no, no, it just won't work.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

You won't get well, they won't be stable enough.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah, that was one thing that it needs to be stability on tomatoes. I said, All right, for stability, here's what I'm doing with tomatoes. I'm growing them vertically. I'm putting in a strong netting that they grow right up through the netting. And the netting is indestructible. I found a good nylon netting that's soft, but you can't break it. And I put in steel posts, you'll see this in any of my books, that holds the whole vertical frame up, and the plants grow vertically. That's a special way to grow tomatoes. You prune off all the side shoots. I don't want to get in too many details here. Good tip though. But if you prune off all the side branches, they're called suckers. Then just the main stem will grow up and the fruit will all hang off from the main stem. And there'll be a gang of fruit about every nine inches. And our tomato towers are six feet tall. So divide nine inches into six feet, you've got a lot of branches of tomatoes. And the b best thing, Mark, is if you prune off all the side branches, which will fruit by themselves, but they take all the energy from the plant. If you prune those off and grow what we call in the square foot gardening system a single stem tomato, all the energy 100% goes right up the main stem, and the first hanging fruit will be the first nine inches, and then every nine inches after that there'll be another. And you'll get more uh tomatoes per square foot than any other method known.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

I've seen that myself at Centennial Farm. Every year the garden there, Jesus, the head gardener, would take the tomatoes from the square foot garden that was at Centennial Farm and use it all month long for the salsa for his employees. He still talks about it today. Really? In fact, Jim Bailey, the founder of Centennial. I met Jim. He he is amazed to this day, even though he's not active in the farm in the in the centennial farm. He has told me year after year that I can't believe you grow tomatoes in six inch deep soil. Yep. He says it's not possible. I would tell him, Jim, look at this. Tell me it's not possible.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Right. Well, there's a case now, Mark, where uh the expert would say, well, the roots have to spread out like a tree uh in order to have support. Well, the when we grow our tomatoes the square foot way, they're sort of just hanging on the fence and they don't need support. All they need are nutrients and moisture, and all of that is in that first six inches of soil.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Well, Mill, you know, other things that grow that spread out like zucchini and melons and watermelons, can we grow them vertically?

SPEAKER_01 7:11

They're all vines. Every one of those is a vine. Now zucchini comes in either a vine or a bush. The bush you can't change. Right. You have to allow it three feet by three feet. That's the size of a children's garden for just one plant. But the others are all vines and they will all grow vertically. And I have grown not only watermelons, the small sugar type ones. The best tasting ones. Oh yes, yeah, and they look good too. I've grown pumpkins, I've grown all kinds of winter squash, and I've grown melons, cantaloupe. And at the Thanksgiving Point Garden that you mentioned before, we had all of our melons growing six and seven feet in the air. And people said, Why so high? I said, just to show off that it could be grown that high. And of course the little kids would come along and say, Oh, they try and jump jump high enough to break one and bring it down, but they didn't.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Well, let's talk a little bit more about what goes into the garden besides the soil. Okay. Because you talked about soil. Well, what do we normally grow in?

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Well, uh, in square foot garden, it's totally different. We start with a perfect soil. Let's not talk about soil at this moment. Okay. What what kind of plants? Oh, what kind of plants? All right, well, let me get back to the soil because I have an interesting story. Not now, but let's you grow every every plant you can think of. Now, at a lecture, there's always a wise guy in the audience when we say you're growing in only six inches of soil. They think a minute and they say, Oh, yeah, well, how do you grow twelve inches of carrots in six inches of soil? And of course the answer is very carefully, but I'll tell you an interesting story. I was growing them on a patio garden, had a plywood bottom, was up on sawhorses, the sides were six-inch lumber, so the soil was only five and a half inches. Right. And it was the perfect soil that we're going to talk about. And I grew carrots in that, and they went down, but I didn't think they would grow that much, but they were long carrots. They went down and turned. And when I pulled them up, they were the shape of like L, the letter L. And I thought, oh, this is terrible. I can't let anyone see this. And then I thought, wait a minute, wouldn't this be fun for kids to grow carrots that come up in all different shapes? So then uh the audience said, Well, how did they taste? And I said, Well, to tell you the truth, they tasted like L. Well, that is a funny one. But you can you can grow any crop. If it's a vine, you grow it vertically. If it's a bush, you grow it just the way. Because it's a perfect soil, then it's got everything you need right there. Now I'll get back to that in a minute. Here's the other thing. You can grow all the root crop. And by the way, we solved the 12-inch carrots. You know how? In that one square, I designed what we call a top hat. Or a condominium. Well, sort of a condominium. It's four pieces of wood put together, set right down on that square. Right on top. Yeah. And so you have six inches of good soil underneath and six inches on top. And how much is that? Twelve inches of perfect soil. I like it. And now you can grow 12 inch carrots.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

I have uh what I call a condominium. Okay. On one of my square feet, where uh in my square foot garden that is for carrots, I normally am not a I don't grow potatoes.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

But there are there are a lot of people. People love potatoes. Potatoes, it's and that condominium also works it does with potatoes.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

You start differently though with carrots, you start with 12 inches of soil and you put your seeds in the top. Right. And then they grow on down the 12 inches. Potatoes, I don't know if most people know it, grow the opposite way. That's correct. They grow up bottom up. Yeah. So you start with an empty square that only has maybe two or three inches in the bottom. Remember your square foot garden has a grid on it. You know exactly where which square you want. You take out four inches of soil and you have two inches left. You put your seed potato pieces down on that and just cover them slightly. Then when they sprout and you see green above, you put in more of the Mells mix, the perfect soil mix. That covers those green. And they'll push right through the soil and you'll see green again. So what you're basically doing is you keep filling in that square as the plants grow. And the nice thing though, as you know, Mark, is potatoes will grow off of the main shoot or stem and be underground. So the taller that stem gets to be, the more potatoes you have in it. And we've grown to potatoes three feet high.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yes. And what I have recommended in my workshops too, Mel, you know, we go into a store and you get these Idaho russet potatoes for two bucks for uh twenty pounds. Yeah. But there are many different varieties of potatoes that you're not going to buy in the supermarket. That's right. And you know, there is a great thing uh in talking about tomatoes. Uh a couple of months ago I was listening late at night and I was doing some reading to a traditional country radio station, and they uh played this song called Homegrown Tomatoes. And that's a song. And one of the words that uh one one of the phrases they used was there's only two things that money can't buy. True love and homegrown tomatoes. And I perked up and uh I I got the name of the tune and uh that's great. And I got it on my YouTube. And we use it every once in a while in our great story with our show. But you know, tomatoes, there's nothing that a homegrown tomato tastes like that you can buy in a store. And well, can you give me the reasons for that?

SPEAKER_01 14:06

What's the difference? Well, when I was uh experimenting for my second book, Cash from Square for Gardening, I w I was searching out different places to sell all of your produce. And I went to some of the restaurants and fast food places, and the fast food places said, your tomatoes look beautiful, but we can't use them. They're not round and they're not small. And they said, we put ours through a slicing machine, and they all have to be the exact same size to get the same slices. Yours may taste good, but they won't look the same. So that they were out as a client. And the only place I found was a gourmet restaurant. Now even the delis said, no, when we slice our tomatoes, we want them all to look really perfect. And the only kind you can get are those that are bought, grown by almost machines. But I did find that in the gourmet restaurants, they loved all kinds of tomatoes that are homegrown. Especially the uh what's a variety that's from from the old days?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Everybody else knows that I think of it. Yeah, we're we're having a senior.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

We're having two senior moments right now. That's fine, but that's okay. Mark, it's fun to have a senior moment with someone else.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

For the most part, though, the tomatoes we buy in a restaurant or in a supermarket are not sold by the re uh the supermarket just as it is with the restaurant for their taste. Yeah. They're they're not they're sold for their ability to last because it generally takes two or three weeks to get from where they're grown to our store, something like that, and their ability to not last, but to endure and look right pretty. Yes. Uh, and not the way they taste. Exactly. That's exactly right. And so there is a great advantage to learning and using right in your backyard, in your square foot garden, growing homegrown tomatoes, and along with that comes true love.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Well, you'll have true love if you grow homegrown tomatoes.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Isn't that true?

SPEAKER_01 16:32

But in a square foot garden, you can grow anything and everything. Remember now it takes so little space to grow all of your crops, only 20%, because we don't waste space with that three-foot aisle next to every single row.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

But Mel, you know, people in California here, for example, we're experiencing a great drought. Oh, very much so, yeah. A lot of people have stopped gardening and putting in uh drought tolerant plants and not growing. Is can square foot garden gardening help us with a situation. Let's check it out.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Ten, you're the water commissioner. You've just said no more vegetable gardens, dead one. I come to you and I say, sir, I can grow a square foot garden that uses only 50% of the garden. How much was that? 50%, half. Would you approve that? I wouldn't know. Okay, you're going to be tough on me. All right, then I'll tell you what, Mr. Commissioner, I can grow a square foot garden with all these vegetables and use only ten percent of the water you would use in a single row garden. What do you mean ten percent? Really, we could. I'll tell you how we do it. Now certainly you would approve that, wouldn't you? In a heartbeat. That means that old fashioned single row gardens are nine times as inefficient with water. And why? If you go to a single row garden, a big one out in the backyard, and you see the guy standing out there with his hose, what's he doing? He's running the hose over the tops of the plants. And he's sitting there humming away, drinking his beer, watering his garden. From the tops down. How big are the tops? Well, this time of the year they're pretty big. Big canopies. Do they need any water on the top? No. In fact, they can burn. Yes. So where do you need the water? At the roots. And he says all the water will trickle down. Well, this sounds like the trickle down economy, yeah. And it won't all trickle down. Eighty percent of the water will be caught by the leaves, the tops, and splash all over. Now here's how we water with square foot gardening. I'd like to hear that. All right, now you have to have an open mind. Remember, I I I designed it this way after many experiments. I tried the old-fashioned way with the hose. Then I said, What if we just hose underneath the plants? Well, it's so the stream is so hard it washes the soil away a little bit. And then I tried sprinkler systems that are on an automatic clock. Well, they do the same thing, they water the tops. So I said, I've got to get down to the roots. So if you look in the book, you'll see a diagram that shows you how to put a transplant in. Picture now a square. And in that square, either one, four, nine, or sixteen plants fit. Let's take the easy one, one per square foot. Let's call that a pepper plant that needs twelve inches between plants. So it's going to go right in the center of a 12 inch by twelve inch square. Before we lower it into the ground, we dig out a little hole there to put in all the roots and everything. Then we take one hand and we make a saucer shape around that hole so that when you put the soil back and you plant it, it's down about a half an inch to an inch below the ground level in that square. But all the rest of the soil goes down to that hole. So that when you do put water on that square, it'll run right down to where the roots are. And it'll hold in the so simple, you just take your hand and run it around, make a saucer shape. Now, what if what if it rains? People say, Oh, that gets all the tops right. Yes, it does. But that will go down, and also instead of running off to the side like rain does, it'll go right down to the root system.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

When is the last time it rained here in southern country? Well, even though we're talking about people are going to be listening all over the country. Yes, they are.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Now, how do you water in what width? Good question. Okay. And a lot of people say, Oh, I spent a lot of money and I got a drip irrigation system. It's beautiful. It takes care of everything. I'd say you're still wasting water. I'd go to the commissioner and say, you're still using twice as much water. Because you've got a pipe that goes along here with little holes in it, and it waters out of those little holes no matter what it's watering. Whether it's nothing. If there's nothing empty square, it's watering that square. If it's little seedlings, it's giving as much water to that as this big huge plant right next to it that needs a lot of water. So drip irrigation, it's it's uh nothing less work. And what we do is we say, and besides, I'll tell you something else about both the drip irrigation and the hose or the sprinkler system. What kind What kind of water are you using? Where did you get it from? Came out of the spigot next to your house, right? Correct. Is that cold water? Last time I checked. Yes. And do plants love cold water? I used to love to spray my kids with that cold water. But it also is filled with chlorine. And salt. And salts and uh all the other stuff. Fluorides are in there.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Now I and it's been exacerbated in the water districts with this drought.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yes, yes, even worse now. I learned when I uh was raising tropical fish. If you either goldfish or tropical fish, if you fill your tank, your aquarium, with water right from the tap, and put the fish in, they're gone. They go belly up just like that. So what do you do? You leave it overnight. You read this in any uh So you have a bucket. Well, it's it's easier if you haven't gotten the fish yet, you just fill the tank, the aquarium, with water, and all those things evaporate at night.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

And in the morning it's warm, room temperature. True. Well, why don't we do the same thing in our garden? Not a bad idea. All right. So here's where I experimented and I designed and said, first of all, what's free, remember? I'm very frugal. You go to the store and they give away five-gallon buckets for nothing.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Right. Or you wouldn't go to a to a bakery. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Bakery is a good source of buckets. Yep, they have all kinds. And if you get a square one, that fits even better. But you get a bucket, it's five gallons, you fill it with your hose with cold water, and that overnight warms up, and it's called sun warmed water. And I love it when people say, raise their hand, you know what they're going to ask. Why do you use sunwarm water? And I ask, how many of you in the audience got a cold shower this morning? And right away they say, boy, these are makes sense. Makes sense. Why started different? That's what square foot gardening is, Mark. It's simple. It's easy and common sense. There's nothing complicated about it. If you're having trouble learning it, ask your six-year-old. They'll still show you how it should be done. We did a book for uh young, and it's square foot gardening for kids. But also on our website we have a lot of information for kids. But it's just all these little simple, easy steps. Now I wanted to get back to the six inches. Do we have time to talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 24:35

I want to talk about that a little bit too, though. Okay. Because to me, technique of square foot gardening is, first of all, it isn't a square foot garden, right? If it doesn't have a grid. Yes, that's true. Grid that is crisscrossing in one square foot increments. Every foot, every inches is important. Why is that?

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Well we want it one square foot. Well, because that defines where where your garden is. It helps you decide. I'm going to plant this square foot. You look around the garden, you think, you know, my lettuce is starting to go. I'll get a summer lettuce and put in here, and then I'll continue to have lettuce. So spacing is spacing is one, but also how much you plant. What does a single-row guy do? He digs a furrow 20 feet long and plants his summer lettuce. And now he's got so much lettuce he doesn't know what to do with it. Do you normally have twenty heads of lettuce in uh in a week? No. Of course you're not. I like to uh when I was in Germany, I learned living on the economy that you the the Germans and all the Europeans shop the same way. First they take a little bag that they have, cloth bag, they don't use plastic, and they go to the store, and usually the wife shops or the grandmother, and they look for what's freshest, and then they want to have a little taste of this and a taste of that, and they decide what looks the best, what's on sale, and what looks freshest, and that's what they buy for dinner. And they don't buy a whole week's supply. So you wouldn't go to the store and buy six heads of cabbage. You buy one at the most. Well, we should grow the same way. How do you grow just one head? Well, you plant just one head at a time. And then later, another week later, you'll plant another head over here.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Well, I know, Mel, uh, you know, I have uh and I think it kind of goes along with your theory of what you're talking about, how cynical it is. I've got a blood orange tree that when it in when it's ready to be harvested, I got more blood oranges than I know what to do with it. Usually I end up giving most of them to the to the uh food banks because they love them. But by the time we get to that point, I've taken so many bags of oranges to my neighbors that when they see me coming with a bag, they turn around and go somewhere else. The same thing happens with gardeners. Yeah. And one of the values that I've learned in square foot gardening is we grow for our own needs. Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Not wasting. We're not planting a 20-foot row of lettuce because the row is 20 feet long. We're planting just two or three heads of lettuce spaced at the six inches apart because that's all we need in one week. And then another week we'll go to another square. And that's part of the advantage of the square.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

So using some consecutive planting cycles enables us to utilize and you harvest the same way what we want. And how long does it take us to harvest a square foot? Very, very little time. And what do we do when we're gonna get into the soil what we're right now? So let's take some time on that. And I want to make a comment too about six inches deep in a uh in a raised bed.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

I have a great deal of concern about raised beds, especially deep raised beds. Deep deep twenty-four inches or deeper. That's great. Because most people like to have their beds up about that high so that they can sit on them and they look good. All right. Well, what I have found in my workshops, I don't know if anybody else has ever come up with this or had this experiment this experience that people like to have raised beds, but after about two or three years they find production fades. And I blame that on having deep beds because what happens is everything sinks to the bottom and eventually it gets sour and it sours the entire soil of a raised bed. I don't know if that's ever come up. I think you're right. In a six-inch deep bed, we don't have that.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

No, we don't. Now, here's how I got six inches because you go out and talk to any expert and any other author. Can you grow plants in six inches of perfect soil? Oh no, you need eight inches, you need 12 inches, you need 16 inches, and and they go on and on. I remember when the French intensive method became a hit. That was 18 inches, and you had to dig down 18 inches deep. That's a lot of work. That that's more topsoil than we have. That's right. Well, you turn you turn the bottom soil up on the top and took the topsoil down on the bottom. It's a very complicated system. And all the garden writers thought, oh, this is the most wonderful thing. And they wrote and wrote and wrote about it. But it turned out to be nothing but hard work. And it may also result in the same thing you're talking about, a bed getting sore sour because it's too deep in the ground. Well, I wanted to see originally I designed we dig up six inches of our existing soil in a four by four area, put it aside on a tart or on a wheelbarrow in a wheelbarrow, and then we mix in six inches of three different components. One was peat moss, one was vermiculite, and one was compost. And I want our listeners to pay attention to what Mel is talking about. All right, that was two inches of each. So we now had two, four, six inches of these ingredients and six inches of our existing soil. Mix it up, pour it back in. You now have twelve inches of improved soil. Keep that in mind. We're doing six inches of perfect soil versus twelve inches of improved soil. And because the improved soil went back in a hole that was only six inches deep, you had to build a box. So even in the first books, you had to build a box four by four, six inches deep, put it out on top of your hole, pour all your soil back in. Now, in twelve inches of improved soil, half of it's your own, half of it's these three ingredients. As I went around the country, people would say, yeah, I dyed that, but it was a lot of work. I said, wait a minute, your your whole garden now is only one fifth of the space of your big garden. Yeah, but still digging up those six inches of soil. I said, if you tried the French intensive method, you would have had to dig up 18 inches. Yeah, but and that butt is when you get stuck. It was still a lot of work, so I said, All right, back to the drawing boards. So that's when I experimented. Took about two and a half years, and I took various amounts of the different material and grew the same thing next to each other of a deeper soil. And so I had all these uh raised beds, and one was only six inches of perfect soil, and one was nine inches of six inches of perfect and three inches of existing, the next was six plus six. Grew the same plants and the same thing, and guess which grew the best? Six inches of perfect soil. I said, Well, what about twelve inches of improved soil? Didn't have it. The plants preferred and grew better. Now I'm not talking about twelve inch carrots, but so I said, Well, why are we digging it up if all we need is six inches of perfect soil on top of our existing soil? Guess what? There's no more work. What tools do you need? What tools do you don't need not to dig up your ground?

SPEAKER_00 33:29

Man, I'll tell you, it saves a lot of sore backs too.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

It sure does. You don't need shovels or hose or pickaxes, rotor tillers, none of that. You don't need any time. And I can't get my wife to do uh well, so the obvious question is if six inches of perfect soil is better than twelve inches of improved soil, forget about twelve inches of improved soil. So when you get one of the square foot gardening books that has all new on it, that tells you exactly how to do the new method, the improved method.

SPEAKER_00 34:04

And what do we get out of it of other than a perfect soil? What what what are the ingredients?

SPEAKER_01 34:11

Well again. Okay, the ingredients are two inches of peat moss, all ground up. It comes all in a bale of what kind of peat moss? Uh sphagnum peat moss. It's it's the common kind. It's very cheap.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

It's very inexpensive. It's readily available. Yeah, there's even in grocery stores.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

So you have two inches of that peat moss. Then you have two inches of compost. Now that compost has some situations with it. I experimented with composting. Compost comes from, if you know how to compost or you've seen it done, comes from a waste material. And in the old days, back when I first started gardening, those were the old days, Mark, they would have a factory making some kind of a product, and they had a waste material from it. Maybe it was sawdust, maybe it was sludge, maybe it was whatever it was. And they would pile it at the end of their property until it leaked through the fence, and then the government came and said, You can't keep that stuff there. You've got to get rid of it. So they took it all and they hauled it to the dump. Well, that was kind of expensive. And the dump said, We can't take that, that's just waste material. So some engineer in the company said, Boss, I got an idea. If we compost our waste material like our sawdust, really compost it, we can bag it in bags and people will buy it. And the boss said, You're crazy. He said, Let me try it. He said, I the boss said, I don't know how to compost. The engineer said, I do. I'll let me do it. And he did it. And people came and wanted to buy all this bagged compost. Absolutely. Now, there were some places that had nothing but sawdust. Well, what I say in my books, don't get that material. Don't get another material that has two ingredients. Get a material that was bagged for four or five different kinds of material, and you'll have a good variety and better nutrients.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Better nutrient values.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

Yes, and the plants can take up those nutrients better. They won't be clogged or they won't choke, if you could picture that, on just one thing. Certainly. So blended compost.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Blended compost. And all the companies make them now. Key ingredient. And uh I see they include many of them things like worm casting. Yes, those are good. Which is fine. Yeah. It doesn't provide any more nutrient, but it does help the cell.

SPEAKER_01 37:05

Yeah, all those different ingredients have different properties. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 37:09

And when they're all blended, you'll have a much better what I also tell people is if you don't want weeds, make sure the compost you buy is well composted. Yes. Especially if you a lot of people use manures. Uh-huh. For whatever reason. I don't think it's necessary in square foot gardening, but in their regular gar if they're doing single row gardening, a key ingredient. You've got cattle and horses that eat things with seeds and but usually it's not it's not composted. But they're not composted. Buy composted manures. Yes. Right. Well composted.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

And get a variety. Now, when you go, watch out for being frugal like me. Don't buy the cheapest one. Because the cheapest one is a bag of steer manure. Correct. Now, I saw a Farside cartoon once. Remember? Sure. Yeah, the Farside cartoons. It had all these steers lined up to go in the slaughterhouse. And it had one steer trying to break into the line at the beginning. And all then the line said, hey, no breaking in the line. So I got thinking, what is a steer thinking when they're in line to be the slaughterhouse? I bet they know what's going on. Somehow their mother's children somehow gets through, yeah. And I don't think I would want their manure because it might have stressful things in it. But if you have cow manure or barnyard manure, then you can picture a happy cow out there just eating the grass and in in the in the compost.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

How about when we compost ourselves? Does that normally provide a uh a sufficient number of uh of diversified it does if you go get them.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

And you make sure you have to get them. Do it. You can't just put all grass clippings in and expect it to be great.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

And be careful with your grass clippings.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Because if you use uh insecticides, you're gonna have trouble.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Now, where do you get grass clippings all composted? At the town dump where they have their recycling plant. And most of the the um most of the people that trim grass or landscapers take it there and dump it there. You have no idea if that's had any poisons put into it.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

You don't have any po idea of what else is. No, that's true. And even in some of the commercials, although commercial products uh have got human waste and although not supposed to have human waste.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

That's called sludge. Sludge. S-L-U-D-G-E. What for if it says no municipal sludge, that's what you want.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

You've got to be careful unless you do it yourself and you know what's in it and try to keep it diverse. Exactly. Exactly. But as a result of the of compost, that has all the nutrients.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Well, first of all, they're all organic. If there's such a mixture there, because we want a variety, and it has all the nutrients your plants need. We don't have to go out and buy any fertilizer and put them in our soil. That compost. Now, people then say, Oh, uh Bell's mix, all those ingredients, they're expensive. And won't they use up the nutrients from that initial compost? And I say, Well, you didn't read far enough in the book. You didn't get chapter two or three or four, because when you harvest one square foot, remember there's a grid there, and you harvest that, and you take that material out and put hopefully into your compost pile, because that's waste uh plant material. And then you add, this is the key, Mark, you add one trowel full of compost, the blended compost.

SPEAKER_00 41:43

Hopefully your own, but if not, buy it. The plant, the plant material. Not the soil. But you never have to replace the soil. You just re-energize your nutrients with regular compost normally. Yeah, right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

What just one shall full. Yeah, a lot of people, you can tell when people didn't read the book because they say, oh, you have to replace all the soil every year. It's too expensive. People ask me that all the time. Do they really?

SPEAKER_00 42:18

They say, oh, it's so expensive.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

Yeah. Why don't people finish a book when they read it?

SPEAKER_00 42:24

You know, you they read the beginning, but don't read the end uh of that chapter. And oftentimes that is the most important part of the Well, that's true, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

But I I think I have a clue. Because when people start reading the first chapter or two and it explains it in general, I've had people tell me, I was so excited, I couldn't wait to start. I put the book down and I don't start it. That's right. I said, but when did you finish the book?

SPEAKER_00 42:51

I I'm uh I'm uh I'm uh when everything else fails, I read the book. Read the book. See what you did.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

You know, it's the same thing with the user manuals, uh, whatever. But here again, this this idea of as soon as one square is finished, and then I I could notice in my experiments that if you just plant it again in that same soil, it wouldn't be as good as the first time. So why not add more nutrients? What are the nutrients? Peat moss no, vermiculate no, they're for water retention and and for drainage. We add the compost. So we had one trowel full of compost and it worked. I want to tell you how I got to six inches. Remember the first you dig up six inches of your soil, mix six inches more of the other good stuff, and you have twelve inches, and everyone complained it's too much work. Sure. So that's I went back to the drawing point, drawing board, and I figured out and tried all these different experiments. And that's why I ended up by finding out that six inches of perfect soil produced a better plant than twelve. Inches of improved soil. You still had that same six inches of material, but it was mixed in with six more inches of lousy soil. And that's what killed the whole garden. So literally killed it. So I then said, all right, hereafter, no more digging, no more tools, no more sweat, no more hard work. We're going to find where our garden is, go out in your garden, lay down a weed fabric, and you can buy this by the roll, either from our website or at the at any nursery. Put your box down six inches deep, fill it with Mel's mix, six inches of perfect soil, lay your grid down, you're ready to start. It's that easy.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

See, that that sounds pretty hard to do. Maybe too simple for me. Too simple, yeah. But it's worked for me for the past almost nine years. Oh, that's great. Nine mail now for almost nine years. How did we meet? Well, do you remember it? Yes, I do. I I remember it very well. Uh it is a changing day in my life when I met you because you told me something that I could do even though I was just graduating from Master Gardener uh class, and it was you were looking for some help in starting a square foot garden program that they asked that Jim Bailey from Centennial Farm asked if you could put one of those on his Centennial Farm. And I lived back east then. No, you lived in Utah, I believe. Oh, in Utah, okay. Uh all right. And probably it was and you came out here and we uh you you were introduced to me at uh one of the at the Mormon temple where you were doing a workshop, and I heard this was the first time I heard about it. I heard about you, but I hadn't heard the your workshop. In California now. Yes, yes, I remember.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

You know how that started? There's an even more interesting part of it, not more interesting, but back in Utah, now I'm not Mormon, but I taught square foot gardening. Right. Uh several places. One I taught the missionaries that go overseas. Okay, and um then I taught at the summertime at Brigham Young University in Utah, and they have a summer session called Summerfest, and they teach all kinds of subjects, and they let me teach square foot gardening there. And I had a crew of two ladies that helped me, I had trained them. Sure. And we taught there. Well, after one session, you know, people come up and they want to meet the author and talk to him. One lady said, I'm from California, and I said, gee, I grew up in California a long time ago. She said, Would you come to California and speak at our church? I'm Mormon, LDS, and I said, Well, if we can work things out, I would. She said, I live in Orange County. I said, gee, my sister lives in Orange County. And so we worked on that, and she was able to get the church to endorse it and have a weekend of square foot gardening, lecture, workshop, and then sales. And people always told me, Oh, the Mormon church, you can't sell anything there. You can't sell your books. But they let me because they said, well, this is valuable, the people should have this. So after the lecture, and that we went out into the parking lot and gave demonstrations and sold all the all the books, and we made boxes and everything. And she was one that got me to come to California, and that was probably the session you came to.

SPEAKER_00 47:57

I believe it was. That's when we met. And then uh shortly thereafter we uh went to Centennial. We went and put put in three diversified beds, yeah, square foot gardens, different sizes, including a pyramid. And that was during the fair months. Those were the most popular part of other than the animals. Yeah, the kids love animals. Yeah, they do. But this is where the families gathered, and I took care of it for eight years. I wish I could still be taking care of them, but just not too much. It's just too much for me at this point with my schedule and as I'm going.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Like in a fair, they had all kinds of animals there, the biggest pigs you ever saw in your life. Yes. And the biggest this and the biggest that. And we were, you said uh they were interested, the kids were interested in animals. We were too, but for a different reason. That's true. We wanted them for our compost.

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Yes. Uh, but it it was interesting uh meeting you there, getting to know you, and when everybody uh from the foundation, when I'm talking to people from the foundation, well, uh, did you ever go to Utah for the? I said, actually, I would have loved to, except I was taught by the master. Oh. And because you wouldn't let me t undertake something that did not have expertise behind it. Well, you hadn't had the classes yet or the training. But since I have and uh I've done I don't know how many workshops over the years. Uh and well, uh and you even went to my daughter's house in Columbia, South Carolina. That's true, one time and put in a square foot garden for her, and she loves it.

SPEAKER_01 49:57

Well, I uh Mark, you're you're one of our best pupils ever. And you've been able to go on and do all these other things. Remind people, we still teach. We still teach. And it's not how do you become a well certified? If you want, first you can go on to our website and take all kinds of classes, and you can get uh study at home classes or you can get classes with a teacher live or on the internet. But then what I always wanted to do is I I thought I can't go everywhere and teach everyone. I need a group of, if you would, disciples, people that learn the system and know the system, and they could teach in their neighborhoods. So I thought of this idea of doing a training session. So we started in Utah and we had a the first one was uh a three-day training session, and at the end, if you passed all the tests, you could become a certified square foot garden teacher. And we started going all around the country giving those. But we even improved on that, as you like to say. We're always thinking of new ways. Some people couldn't travel that far and they couldn't stay that long, so we started giving them on the internet. And now you can take classes to become a genuine certified square for garden teacher over the internet, and you'll have real life sessions with our teaching cadre. We have two gals that really do a great job in teaching everyone. And then once you become a certified teacher, you're free to go out and start giving classes. We start showing you how to earn extra money because I'm a businessman from long ago, and I want to see people have a small hometown business or just a home business. And you can design gardens for people, you can go and install them, you can sell them books, you can do all kinds of things. We've got great ideas. Mel, what's your website? SquarefootGardening.com. We have another one called squarefootgardening.org, O-R-G. And it's kind of exciting. All you have to dial in is M-E-L, and suddenly it comes up. Google's gotten it.

SPEAKER_00 52:19

Well, Mel. We've come about to the end of our two sessions, and we could go on from more. Gosh, I've thought of so many things. I know, isn't it amazing?

SPEAKER_01 52:33

Well, let's do this again sometime. We're uh renewing our websites right now, so um you'll find some things a little different than what I just talked about, but we've got our certified teachers all over the country.

SPEAKER_00 52:48

And many uh uh garden places put on program. Even Centennial Farm does uh from time to time. I know I put them on during the fair and at other times, but we're available all over and would be uh love to share the experience of square foot gardening. And Mel, just to end up, thank you again. See you next week.