Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet! Related Content How to Make Your Own Beer This presentation from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR in Puyallup, Wash., explains how to get started wi... Plant Edible Ground Cover You can sneak a few attractive, low maintenance food plants onto your lawn, and your neighbors will ... In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn’t turn up any data for home harvest amounts — only figures for commercial agriculture. For years, I’ve known that my California garden produces a lot. The Objective I took a 5-by-20-foot section of garden bed by my tiny lawn to see how much I could grow in just that 100 square feet. The Plants I wanted to make this garden simple — something anyone in the United States could grow. The first season (spring/summer 2008), I grew the following: The only plants I grew from seed were the zucchinis.
A Living Spreadsheet The Results. Sfg in MN - Square Foot Gardening Forum. Hi! I'm a MN square foot gardener, this is my second year - and it's been great! I live just southeast of the Twin cities just a few miles from the Mississippi river. Our soil is very sandy, needed alot of amending, and since I'm not wild about battling a tiller every year, we decided permanent raised beds were the way to go.
We made Mel's mix last year, and the results were just okay, nothing spectacular. This year we added 4 cubic yards of composted manure to the boxes and the garden has really taken off. I began planting in mid-April and there were a few nights I had to cover things up. So far this year, I have harvested English peas, sugar snap peas, snow peas, beets, yellow squash, patty pan squash, cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower. We added permanent raised bed boxes, in addition to the above, for asparagus, strawberries, blueberries and raspberries this year.
In the three years we have been in Minnesota the weather has been a little different every year. An Introduction to Square-Foot Gardening. I grew up in the country — gardening meant a large plot, plowed and raked, and then planted with long, widely-space rows of vegetables. It also meant weeding and hoeing, weeding and hoeing.
Gardening was a chore. When Kris and I bought our first home, we both wanted a vegetable garden, but we didn’t want the drudgery that came with it. Besides, we didn’t have a big space in the country — we had an average city lot. Fortunately, we discovered Mel Bartholomew’s Square-Foot Gardening. The square-foot gardening concept is simple: Build a raised bed, divide the space into sections of one square-foot each, and then plant vegetables (and/or flowers) in just the amount of space they need. Our raised beds were similar to these (photo by johnyaya) We built our square-foot garden one Saturday in mid-April.
Digging was less fun. After we built the raised beds and outlined the growing space, we followed the guidelines in Bartholomew’s book. Layout. Now’s the time to get your garden space ready. Minnesota Growing Zone USDA Map. Click on the image above to see a larger version. While there are many trees, shrubs and flowers that can survive a chilly Minnesota winter, it is useful to know exactly which ones these are before you purchase your plants. The Minnesota USDA plant hardiness map provides information based on average winter low temperature data collected over a 30-year time period. The new USDA plant hardiness map for 2012 indicates that Minnesota growing zones include 3a and 3b in the northerly regions, 4a in the middle of the state and 4b in the south.
An extremely tiny pocket of warmer winter low temperatures exists in the most southerly location and is categorized as 5a. To find your growing zone on the Minnesota planting map, enlarge the map above and look for your general area. On the USDA site, you can search your growing zone by zip code as well. This article was last updated on Did you find this helpful? Additional Help & Information Didn't find the answer to your question? Square Foot Gardening. Tim's Square Foot Gardening. Square Foot Gardening Store | Raised Bed Planters, Square Foot Gardening Grids, Square Foot Gardening Boxes.