Planning the Spring square foot garden

See? I didnt kill it last year afterall

Usually when I do a vegie garden I just do it on a whim. I go to Bunnings, see what they have, decide what we like to eat and buy seedlings. I then randomly stick them in the ground and wait for them to grow. This method seems to work quite well although I do tend to go a long time with nothing to harvest while everything grows, then I end up with a heap of the same thing. Like the Beetroot and Leeks I planted over winter. I pulled out ten Leeks today. Im going to have to slice them up and freeze them. See them all in the right of the pic?

Over the past couple of weeks I have been looking into the square foot garden method of gardening. Basically the idea is you plant alot more different vegies, alot closer together than the pack recommends. You get fewer weeds because everything is so crowded. I really like this idea and it suits my two little plots because they don't have alot of room in them. I followed the advice on the 'My Square Foot Garden' blog (see side bar for button/link) and drew up a plan. I used the advice on the blog about how many plants to put in each square, depending on what type of plant it is. For example, a tomato plant needs 1 square foot (I decided to do 30cm squares, since we are metric) whereas you can put 9 dwarf bean plants in 1 square foot. I decided on what plants to buy based on the types of food we like to eat and the quantities of things we like to eat. Tomato and tomato products are very popular here so I planned to plant alot of them. I also considered space in my planning because it would be best if I didn't have too many over hanging plants as Im not sure how much space outside of my garden bed I am able to use. Below is the picture of my plan. See all the dirty finger prints from all the gardening?

After drawing up the plan Chloe and I went on a walk to the garden with our wheely bucket of garden tools (thats what Chloe calls it) and pulled out as many weeds as we could in preperation for planting the following weekend. She is very excited about the whole process which I love. She is definitly eating alot more veg now that she is helping to grow it. She LOVES the pickled Beetroot.