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By the Square Foot: This back 40 can fit anywhere; proponent hopes to see idea flourish
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Michael Rahman will be turning over the care of his square-foot to Shelley Wallace, 11, while he is in Spain for six months.
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Published: June 6, 2009
Square-foot gardening has been around since the early 1980s. Mel Bartholomew popularized the concept with a book by the same name. Bartholomew also had his own PBS show on the subject.
It's a pretty basic concept. You build a box of specific dimensions -- 4 feet by 8 feet is typical. You fill the box with an imported soil mix of ⅓ compost, ⅓ sand and ⅓ peat moss, what Bartholomew terms the perfect soil mix. You then divide the surface of the unit into square-foot divisions. Each square produces one kind of vegetable.
It is an easy and adaptable system, and it has found an advocate in Winston Salem in Michael Rahman. Rahman was born in India and lived in England, Paris, and Thailand. Now, he spends half the year in Spain and half the year in Winston-Salem. Rahman is a recently retired environmental engineer.
Rahman went through the Forsyth County Agricultural Extensions Master Gardener training in the spring of 2008. As a committee member of both Friends of the Tanglewood Arboretum and Forsyth County Agricultural Extensions Community Gardening Committee, Rahman has been a proponent of the square-foot gardening concept, recognizing both its ease and utility in a variety of situations from schoolyards to backyards to apartment houses and decks.
The committees agreed to Rahman's idea of setting up demonstration square-foot gardens at the Extension's office on Fairchild Drive and at the Tanglewood Arboretum in 2010. But Rahman didn't want to wait that long, so he has started to assist with square-foot gardens in other places.
Rahman greeted me at his home along with Shelley Wallace, a neighbor and fellow gardener. Shelley, 11, is in the highly academically gifted program at Brunson Elementary School. She will be tending Rahman's garden when he is in Spain.
Rahman's garden is a mixture of spring and summer vegetables -- three kinds of tomatoes, radishes, arugula, broccoli, spinach, onions and a couple varieties of lettuce.
"I spent about $64 in lumber," Rahman said in his distinctly British accent.
Rahman filled the beds with a potting mix of Popes Sand and Gravel and bagged vermiculite. He said that he spent about $30 on soil.
Fencing panels surround the garden to fend off rabbits and other poachers and encroachers. Each panel can be removed for working and harvesting and easily slid back into place. The surface is divided into a square-foot grid with vinyl strips of lattice that are attached with screws to hold them in place.
In his proposal to the garden committees, Rahman recognized that most of Winston Salem has space for a garden this size.
"Rather than a community garden, I proposed that we have a community of gardeners who use their own space to produce their own food," he said.
The community-garden committee hopes to lead by example, providing instruction and consultation on how to build a square-foot garden.
Sandra Sheldon, the junior warden at St. Anne's Episcopal Church, has done just that. A group of 10 volunteers spent about 90 minutes building two square-foot gardens under Rahman's tutelage. It is part of a larger peace garden that the church has constructed through a grant from the Episcopal Foundation. The project was initiated by Margaret Hermann.
Sheldon and Rahman met as part of the community gardening committee.
"One of the things I didn't know until we started gardening here is that we have deer" Sheldon said. They hope that fencing will deter the deer.
Sheldon also came up with the idea of putting netting beneath the square-foot beds to deter tunneling moles and voles.
Sheldon shares Rahman's idea that each house in the church's neighborhood could have a square-foot garden. She has already seen a lot of enthusiasm, noting that one parishioner went right home and built his own square-foot garden.
At Adkins Academy, Rahman helped Wendy Banks and her eighth-graders build a square-foot garden. Banks is a teacher's assistant in social studies and also a corrective-reading specialist.
"Each kid drilled one hole and set one screw" Rahman said.
The garden is just getting started, but it includes basil, beans and tomatoes.
"The square-foot garden will be a gateway to a larger garden that is being planned for the area," Banks said. "We hope to increase production so that we can start a community market to sell produce," Banks said.
She also wants to introduce students to new vegetables that they might not find in the store. And she wants to teach them about preparing food.
Banks said that the recent rains have made it difficult to get out to the garden, but an advantage of the square-foot garden is being able to access it from all sides without walking in it.
"One of the biggest advantages that square-foot gardening has," Rahman said, "is that it is an easy first step. It gets them started. It's a great thing to get people growing."
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, N.C. 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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