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Head Butler Garden Supply: How to grow more vegetables with less work and more pleasure.
By
Published: Mar 05, 2024
Category:
Gardening
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LAST WEEK IN BUTLER: Weekend Butler. The Things They Carried. Randall Jarrell. Kara Swisher: Burn Book.
It’s about to be Spring. Time for the annual gardening feature. The goal is unchanged: to help your garden grow with greater yield and less work. And there’s the satisfaction of walking past the produce section of your market and not being rocked by the prices because you’re not going to be paying them. And then there’s the soul food factor. That is, food for your soul. Trust Audrey Hepburn: “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
The king of square foot gardening — planting in raised beds that are contained by planks any fool could hammer together — is Mel Bartholomew, an engineer who retired in 1975 and took up gardening as a hobby. He had also been an efficiency expert, so he had lots of questions that others might not have dared to ask. Like: Why plant a zillion seeds, only to thin 95% of the young plants a few weeks later? Like: Why plant entire rows of a single crop if you don’t, for example, want 30 cabbages to ripen at the same time? Why leave a 3-foot aisle between rows? Why add compost that doesn’t give you great soil for seven years?
The answers he got were the same each time: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
To a smarty, them’s fightin’ words. Watch his video.
Bartholomew breaks gardens down to 12” squares — literally. With proper spacing, that means just four plants per square. By his math, planting in 12” squares instead of long rows saves you 80% of the garden area. To put it bluntly (and he does): “You can grow 100% of the harvest in only 20% of the space.” [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. And because good habits start young, there is “Square Foot Gardening with Kids.” To buy it from Amazon, click here.]
What does Bartholomew ask of you? Lay out a 4′ by 4′ area, frame it with planks nailed together (and, if you’re so inclined, painted a crisp white). Dig up the top six inches of soil. Mix in peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Now you have a 12” high growing area. Plant it.
Bartholomew shows you how to do everything. When to do it. What tools you’ll need (few). How much work lies ahead (not so much). Everything important gets a big, clear, color photograph. And from the testimonials it really looks as if a few minutes a day can yield a bountiful organic harvest.
“The Vegetable Garden’s Bible,” by Edward C. Smith, is a first cousin to the square-foot method. Smith lives in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont; whenever you read this, it might be snowing there. Smith is a bigtime gardener — he grows 100 kinds of vegetables in 1,500 square feet — so it’s harder for him to think small. And he does require a bit more of you. (No readymade compost for him, and he likes to dig deep.) But he adopts the raised bed approach. He likes wide rows. He’s organic.
Smith, like Bartholomew, had revelations along the way. “Whenever a plant’s growing space gets wider or deeper or both, its growth improves.” He teaches you how to really read a seed catalogue. He shares useful tips, like planting mint and horseradish — in pots, so they don’t grow wild — to repel cabbage moths and bean beetles. And he takes you through every process, in step-by-step photographs. [To buy the paperback of “The Vegetable Garden’s Bible” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Effortless gardening? Only in those TV commercials that show you how to roll out a carpet of ready-to-sprout flowers or grow tomatoes upside down on a porch.
Nearly effortless? These books show you how. Now you have no excuse not to grow your own.
TOOLS FOR GARDENERS WHO TEND TRADITIONAL GARDENS
ARS HP-300L Needle Nose Fruit Pruners
Nantucket Spider Extra Strength Tick Repellent Spray
BONUS BOOK
The Gardener Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom
Some samples:
John Muir: “Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal.”
Mahatma Gandhi: “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”
Mirabel Osler: Gardening is the one occupation where “if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.”
And this…“As long as we are dirty, we are pure.”
The real arrival of Spring, sprouting, flowering — my gardening friends have reported in. Like this:
Eclipse Sun Sleeves
A friend who swears by them writes:
Sunblock gloves keep you from getting brown spots all over your hands from too many hours in the garden or on a boat. They are quite elegant in an Edwardian sort of way, and double as gloves in the subway in hot weather when you don’t really want to be touching the poles and stair rails but actual gloves would be weird. They are made of polyester and spandex, UPF 50+ Full Arm & Hand Sun Protection. Made in America. Small is the size most women would wear.
[To buy a pair of sun sleeves from Amazon, click here.]
Jill Brooke on her favorite new book: “The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants”
What hasn’t Jill Brooke done? She’s been a CNN correspondent. Editor in Chief of Travel Savvy and Avenue. A columnist for the New York Post and Ad Week. A contributor to the New York Times. She launched Flower Power Daily “to plant seeds of possibility and share some of my hard-won wisdom with others, as well as do what I love. Whenever I’ve needed a breath of beauty or a break from the ugliness of the world, flowers have been my solace.” Follow her on Instagram: @flowerpowerdaily. To subscribe to the weekly newsletter, click here.
Why this book? Jill writes:
Jennifer Jewell’s book brings us not only into gardens but into beautiful worlds and minds. In these pages, I met women of all colors, from different counties and countries, and economic classes, and all ages, all connected through a love of flora.
Jewell, who also runs the award-winning podcast Cultivating Place, points out reasons why as a culture we “articulated gardens to be exclusionary objects of status and wealth. It was as though gardening only existed for a slim sector of the world.” Not true. So Jewell gathered the stories of 75 plant-based women.
Multicultural narratives “open and change the horticultural conversation to include far more diverse voices and cultural-historical perspectives,” says Jewell. “It is so important to empower the gardens and embrace the power for positive change through this human impulse to garden. For too long, we’ve been spoken down to as though we were engaging in some pretty but unnecessary frivolous activity instead of the impactful one it is, including conversations about biodiversity, air and water quality. This is where gardening needs to move.”
[To buy “The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
