All New Square Foot Gardening

by Mel Bartholomew

Do you know what the best feature is in All New Square Foot Gardening? Sure, there are ten new features in this all-new, updated book. Sure, it's even simpler than it was before. Of course, you don't have to worry about fertilizer or poor soil ever again because you'll be growing above the ground. However, the best feature is that anyone, anywhere can enjoy a square foot garden - children, adults with limited mobility, and even complete novices can achieve spectacular results.

But, let's get back to the ten improvements. You're going to love them:

1. New Location - Move your garden closer to your house by eliminating single-row gardening. Square foot gardens need just 20% of the space of a traditional garden.

2. New Direction - Locate your garden on top of existing soil. Forget about pH soil tests, double-digging (who enjoys that?), or those never-ending soil improvements.

3. New Soil - The new "Mel's Mix" is the perfect growing mix. We give you the recipe, and best of all, you can even buy the different types of compost needed.

4. New Depth - You only need to prepare a SFG box to a depth of 6 inches! It's true - the majority of plants develop just fine when grown at this depth.

5. No Fertilizer - The all new SFG does not need any fertilizer - ever! If you start with the perfect soil mix, then you don't need to add fertilizer.

6. New Boxes - The new method uses bottomless boxes placed above ground. We show you how to build your own (with step-by-step photos).

7. New Aisles - The ideal gardening aisle width is about three to four feet. That makes it even easier to kneel, work, and harvest.

8. New Grids - Prominent and permanent grids added to your SFG box help you visualize your planting squares and properly space them for maximum harvest.

9. New Seed-Saving Idea - The old-fashioned way advocates planting many seeds and then thinning the extras (that means pulling them up). The new method means planting a pinch - literally two or three seeds - per planting hole.

10. Tabletop Gardens - The new boxes are so much smaller and lighter (only 6 inches of soil, remember?), you can add a plywood bottom to make them portable.

Of course, that's not all. We've also included simple, easy-to-follow instructions using lots of photos and illustrations. You're going to love it!

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Reference, How To, Food, Nature, Plants

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess whatever works for people is great, and it seems like he has a lot of converts...but I sure wasn't crazy about Mel's method and even less so about his delivery. It is like listening to a used car salesman - and immediately after saying that while I was reading, I read the next paragraph, where he compared his book to a brand new shiny Cadillac. Sheesh.

He essentially advocates container gardening, cloaked in the guise of shallow 6" raised beds. The beds are self-contained, filled with a vermiculite mix, and broken down - literally, he is very emphatic about this - into 1 foot squares. So, effectively, you are planting each crop in 1/2 cubic foot of soil. And not fertilizing, beyond applications of compost he alludes to but never explains. (Wouldn't these tiny bins soon overflow?) He says it works, but there are very few pictures of actual vegetables in his book - instead it is a lot of petunias and such, which I find pretty ugly planted in a visible grid.

I like that his method could encourage rotation, but if you are actually concerned about pests I question whether moving a plant family over one foot would actually make it out of reach of a fungus or insect.

If you want a garden, but don't actually want to spend much time gardening, and are a bit of a control freak (he waxes poetic about the beauty of these nice neat 4x4 containers) who doesn't want the messiness of plants, this could be a good book for you. If that sounds sassy, I don't mean it that way - I really do think that this is his audience.

Oh, one more thing - he also talks about "Square Meter Gardening", his effort to stop hunger by bringing his method to starving people in the third-world. It just seems awfully absurd, patronizing, and potentially damaging, to bring this method that is focused on purchasing and importing soil (NOT enriching or using any of the existing soil) and is presumably designed for temperate zones where a lush summer vegetable garden isn't that hard to come by, to dry poor countries. I don't know that it is economically nor ecologically feasible. Is his assumption really that subsistence farmers are starving because they just don't know how to farm? (I believe so, since he actually uses the "teach a man to fish" cliche in his proposal.) If so, I doubt that Mel's method will go a long way towards changing that.

[Adrienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I were rating this gardening method, I would give it five stars. No question. But alas, I'm rating the book, and I kind of hate it. The information in it is awesome, but the delivery feels less like a book and more like an infomercial...a really, really long infomercial. Seriously, the whole thing just sounds like a sales pitch. Look, Mel, your method is amazing. It's wildly popular and successful. You don't need to sell it anymore. We are all coming to this book because we are (for the most part) already sold. We just want the details.

Honestly, the salesman language kinda harms the author's credibility, in my mind. If it weren't for all the bloggers raving about their success with this method, I would have tossed the book aside after the first few pages, simply because the language feels kinda slimy. But there ARE all those bloggers, and they ARE indeed raving about the success they're having with this method, so I read the whole damn book. And I'm glad I did. But really, I just want the information, not the sales pitch.

[thefourthvine · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a gardening method, Square Foot Gardening is pretty great. This book, though -- this book is not great.

Mel is a big fan of science and math, so let me break down this book by the (estimated) numbers:

20% Discussion of how amazing Square Foot Gardening is, or how amazing Mel Bartholomew is
20% Actual gardening content
10% Weird and/or culturally insensitive stuff
10% Charts that don't render correctly in the ebook version
40% Repetition of all of the above

The book starts with a full chapter on the History of Mel and Square Foot Gardening. I will be honest: I don't care. I am glad Mel came up with this method, and I'm glad he's got all this experience teaching it and proselytizing (word used advisedly), but I'm here to read about gardening, not Mel or what was going on with Square Foot Gardening in the 1970s. But you can't just skip the chapter and skip this content -- like everything else, it repeats over and over, throughout every chapter of the book. (He even includes, in the text, quotes from random satisfied gardeners. They all look like this: "Such a great technique! I am definitely happy to be engaging in Square Foot Gardening." -- Jane, Texas. These do not add anything and get seriously old after a while.)

Then you start in on the actual gardening content. It's -- look, this part is kind of a victim of its own successs. When I started getting into gardening, this method is pretty much how everyone said to do it. This information is all over the internet. There are a few nuances you learn in this book, but honestly, you can find virtually of this, for free, online. And you get to read it without hearing about the greatness of what you're reading about. Additionally, this doesn't really go into enough detail -- you're going to need another source of information for your local area anyway.

Then comes the unfortunate viewpoints. Mel, uh, diverges a lot into things like "remember, we rest on Sundays" (I don't; I'm Jewish, and my sabbath day isn't Sunday), and he talks about how ladies are super bad at building stuff, and about how all poor people really need is a SFG, not a government handout. I don't really enjoy sexism along with my gardening tips.

I can't say much about the charts. I read this in ebook form, so I couldn't read them.

But the biggest problem with the book, for me, was how incredibly repetitious it is. Everything you read will be repeated dozens of times, in every section of the book. If you've been paying even moderate attention, this rapidly goes from annoying to boring to frustrating as hell. If all the repetition had been cut, there'd have been enough room to go into detail on climates and crop choices, and other stuff that's more important than being reminded yet again how much space SFG saves.

I love this gardening technique. It's the one I use (with modifications). But I do not at all love this book. If you're just starting out, google raised bed gardening and go with it. If you aren't just starting out, this book will be useless to you. Get an area-specific book and read that. But if you're mostly interested in the greatness and history of Mel Bartholomew, this is definitely the book for you.

[UniquelyMoi ~ BlithelyBookish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Includes Photos of Our Own Garden

Mel Bartholomew is famous for his Square Foot Gardens, and in All New Square Foot Gardening, he gives us the tools we need to have the garden of our dreams. Pictures, easy to follow illustrated instructions, tips and tricks... regardless of the level of your gardening expertise, this is a must have book!

We live in the High Desert of Southern California where the soil is either sandy or like clay. We haven't had much success with our gardens in the past, but this year we got serious and decided to go with container gardening, and we are so, so glad we did!

Because of the harsh climate here we decided to use cinder block instead of wood for the containers. Not only will it hold up better, it's cheaper! We also had rich, garden soil brought in to replace what nature gave us.

The openings along the sides of the cinder blocks will hold marigolds, strawberries, chives, and other plants that don't require a lot of room. The marigolds will help deter certain pests, while also attracting bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies which will help pollinate the plants.


Grandsons Helping Out!




4x4 Planter Squared Off and Drip Lines Ready to Use



This area will have tomatoes and pepper plants. It's our salsa container!



Our Square Foot Garden Ready to Plant!



I'll update with photos throughout the season, so stay tuned!

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I agree with the review just before mine in almost every respect. What I personally found most insensitive in the book was his plan to bring his method of farming to so-called "developing nations". The way he talked about it was so patronizing that if only I had read that first (it's at nearly the end of the book) I would have never read any further. He dismisses other cultures' diets in a single sentence and, as the previous reviewer notes, acts like the only reason people anywhere are starving is because they don't know how to adequately farm. More generally I also found his method lacking for application in my own American garden, finding it much too highly engineered for my own taste and not in any way intuitive. To my own mind, perhaps people who want to so heavily control their own little space in this world should be doing something that's a little less messy and unpredictable than gardening.

[Marisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, if you can get past the bragging and boasting about how great Mel thinks he is, and how the SFG method TAKES! UP! LESS! SPACE! and how it's revolutionary and how everyone else is doing it wrong, it might be an okay book. But gosh, I think on every page of the forty I read, he mentioned something about how this garden takes up less space. WE GET IT, MEL, it's why we picked up the book! I couldn't take it anymore. I just wanted to read about gardening. You can learn all you need to know from this book by reading the back of seed packets and a few free online resources. So glad I didn't buy this, like I originally planned.

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mel Bartholomew is a huge advocate of box gardening. Box gardening is a great idea, especially when you have alkaline clay like we have in our backyard. Constructing the boxes is a snap -- okay, more like a whine, because it takes a drill. He doesn't emphasize enough, though, that the gardens take a huge amount of water, because the wood seems to wick the water away from the dirt.

Stuff seems to grow well in Mel's Mix, if you plant it in the right part of the season. Last year we planted quite late, so our harvest was pretty meager. This year, all of our varieties of lettuce are already huge, our asparagus is coming up, our strawberries are going wild, and our carrots seem to be doing well. For some reason, though, tomatoes seem to just as well in the clay, if not better. So we're doing an experiment: planting tomatoes in boxes and out of boxes to see which are better.

The square-foot part of the idea seems to work for some things, but it's not as helpful for others. I find his emphasis on the idea a little funny. For things that can be planted in a single square, they're great. But last year our tomatoes plants got so big that they overflowed into other squares, choking out the plants that were in them. And, I'm sorry, but strawberries were meant to take over a whole box. There's just no point in dividing the plants up.

The book is very conversational. Some of the concepts could use better diagrams, like the greenhouse idea. And he mentions that each box will last for several years, but he doesn't give any ideas about how to move the dirt when you have to take one apart. And his idea of putting chicken wire on the bottom of the box to keep critters out is great -- but we've learned that you have to use maybe quarter inch chicken wire, because small rodents like voles can get through the one inch. And the edges of the wire tear up the weed fabric, so we have weeds around the edges of the boxes.

Thankfully, though, the garden boxes themselves are really easy to weed, because the dirt doesn't get compacted from being walked on, like you get with a normal garden. Overall, I'm glad we're using this approach, because the results we got the first year trying to plant directly in our clay (with some topsoil thrown on top) was rather sad -- except for the tomatoes.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

My garden roughly follows Mel's plans, so this was clearly an influential book as I built my first garden. However! According to Mel, I don't have a square foot garden because I don't use a physical grid. And I plant a little haphazardly. I mean, it's a great system in a lot of ways, but you don't have to follow the rules. This kind of garden drill sergeant business is not for me, so I just focus on the information in the book that is useful to me and carry on.

There is a lack of detail on some points: he says "use mulch!" but never talks much about what kind of mulch. However, one point where the lack of in-depth information is actually something I appreciated is Mel's philosophy about pests and bugs. Too many beginner gardening books are loaded down with tales of fungi, mildews, and other plagues. I think it's important to wait and see, or talk to your extension office if you're really worried, and otherwise just keep going. So you lose a few plants, it's okay. There's no sense in freaking out ahead of time about plant problems.

His writing style irritated me. I would have preferred a straightforward, no nonsense treatise on his system. Instead, I got a lot of not-funny jokes and plenty of Mel talking about how great Mel is.

[cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Want to grow a veggie or flower garden but don't think you can? Think again. No excuses of not enough space, no yard or no ability. This is the book for any person with any skill level with just a patio or a yard, for the professional or for the handicap in a wheel chair. School children and 3rd world countries have used this technique with great success. I read this book in 1 afternoon and then my 13 year old son and husband built my boxes in 1 more afternoon. I'm taking pictures along the way to show our progress. I think this is something that even my grandparents, who are both in wheel chairs, would enjoy and can do.
If not for you, then buy this for a friend, neighbor or family member. They will thank you!

[Whiskey Tango · Rating 5 out of 5]

Square foot gardening allows you to enjoy freshly harvested produce without the exhaustive work. Gardening should be fun, simple, and easy to understand and create. This method has moved from the fringe into the mainstream.

The basic concept: Create a small garden bed (4 feet by 4 feet or 4 feet by 8 feet are common sizes) and divide it into a grid of 1-foot squares, which you manage individually. Seeds or seedlings of each kind of vegetable are planted in one or more squares, at a density based on plant size (e.g., you’d plant about 16 radish seeds per square, but only one tomato plant). Since there are no paths, there is no wasted space, and the soil in the bed stays loose because you never step on it.

Mel advocates creating a 6-inch-deep frame or raised bed and filling it with a mixture of vermiculite, peat moss, and compost to plant in instead of garden soil enriched with compost.

Making it easy to grow vegetables means:

Less cooking (eating more salads)
Less fuel ( no trucks bringing vegetables to you
Eating fresh
No waste (composting your veggie scraps)
Less trash.
Less water used.
Less groundwater pollution.
No fertilizers.
No plastic waste.

If you are engaging in traditional gardening you are doing too much work--watering, weeding and wasting. Square foot gardening revolutionized traditional gardening, which relied on large rows occupying a good portion of your land.

Vegetables can be tightly spaced.
Weeding is not necessary.
Garden "dirt" is not a very good medium for growing produce.
Traditional gardening methods are wasteful.
(Save water, time, weeds, space.)

Ten Basics

1. Plant densely.
(So much produce will grow in a tight space)
2. Grow up.
(Grow up, not out. The trellis should be used for tomatoes.)
3. Mel's Mix, not garden soil.
4. Garden close to your home.
5. Grow shallow.
(Raised beds need a mere 6 inches of soil.)
6. Fertilizer is not needed.
7. Keep aisles between boxes narrow.
(Rather than long rows, a garden is most efficient planted in small boxes with aisles set about 3 feet apart.)
8. Be stingy with seeds.
9. Plant in squares.
(one-foot squares--04' x4')
10. Rotate crops.

How ironic that this method of growing food 9in a box is an idea, which resulted from thinking "outside the box."
"Happy gardening."

[Caron · Rating 1 out of 5]

A friend insisted that I just had to look at this book again. After rejecting it over a decade ago, and since then, having heard only one or two neophyte friends mention "square foot", in all those years, I was dubious. But I thought, "I respect his opinion, how bad could THAT BOOK really have been?"

My memories were that the book was gimmicky and uninformative and therefore useless to me, myself having grown up with at least some experience in growing food.

However, upon second look, I am forced to say: It's worse than I remember. This book is truly awful. It should be called "Gardening for non-gardening, tool-phobic, un-environmentally-friendly, controlling, sexist, Dummies".

There. I said it. I will feel even better when I return this book to my friend (stuffed in a paper bag to hide the cover).

I leave you with the quote that made me drop (literally drop) this book in disgust: "Women tell me they love this because it requires no tools, wire cutting, equipment, or familiarity with construction." Hello, published in 1981... And goodbye.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an anal approach to gardening that you can't help but succeed at it. I love an anal approach (that's what she said) so I was all over this.

[Yaaresse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frankly, I'm having a hard time remembering why I thought so highly of this book years ago. While there are some good charts and diagrams, the basic concept isn't all that (pardon the pun) ground-breaking. I remember my mother doing this stuff back in the early 70s. I never thought much about it then because she had a green thumb all the way to her shoulder and had all different kinds of gardening set-ups in our yard and over the years.

The reason for my lowering my rating for the book, however, is that the author's tone is just plain obnoxious. The way he goes on about how brilliant he is, you'd think he'd discovered the cure for cancer.

[Robert Butson · Rating 5 out of 5]

could have been shorter if homeboy didn't spend so much time bragging and making fun of old school gardeners

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some helpful information, but it really mostly felt like I was stuck listening to a 6 hour infomercial.

[tinaathena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a SFG now! Useful info, but repetitive (we get it Mel, your mix is loose and friable!). Would recommend to other gardeners who are in first couple years of gardening!

[Leo Walsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. Talk about your let-downs.

When I purchased my first house in the 90s, I wanted to grow vegetables, especially tomatoes. But being a college kid from suburban Ohio, I was clueless about this "gardening stuff." So I purchased Mel Bartholomew's SQUARE FOOT GARDENING (SFG). It was a great method for a beginner, as it focused on small garden plots, as small as 4 feet by 4 feet. I cut my teeth on that book.

Years have gone by, and I've continued gardening. In fact, I can state that I now have some gardening "game." I coax quite a bit of produce from small garden plots. I still sort of use the Square Foot method, notably his plans spacing, use of tiny plots with ample walkways, and his insistence on sewing a seed or two at a time on a hole instead of dumping a whole packet of seeds. And following Bartholomew's advice, I freeze the unused seeds and sow them year after year, so a single package of seeds can last me five or so years.

But what I neglected was starting plants from seed. I've tried in the past with mixed results, but this year, with everyone on Covid-19 near-lockdown, I decided to try again. But I wanted to know WHEN to start the plants and remembered the original SFG book had a super-useful planner. So I checked this out of the library, expecting an update of his original classic.

But instead of an update, this reboot is awful. Here, Bartholomew sounds self-absorbed, a man with a patri=onizing, almost messianic complex. As if he's saying, "Me, the white engineer, am here to teach those uncivilized Africans, Indians, Asians and South Americans how to grow food the RIGHT WAY... WHICH IS MY WAY!" As if. I mean, these people haven't been supporting themselves via subsistence farming for centuries. Heck, if anything, they could probably teach Bartholomew a thing or two if he'd bother listening.

And he has similar things to say about poor Americans on welfare, IMPLYING that they need his gardening method more than they need food stamps. Silly. Imagine working 3 jobs and raising a kid, as many working poor on food stamps do. When in the heck will they have time to plant a garden. Even I, with no children at home and a relatively open freelancer's schedule, took until this year to try tomatoes, peppers, etc. from seeds again.

Oh, and I'd hate to let my sister read this book. Since Bartholomew has a lot of sexist things to say about the "fairer sex." Yikes.

And it that sort of opinionated, self-serving crap wasn't enough, this book's content sucks compared to the original. instead of covering things in-depth as the previous book did, this edition seems short. Sure, it's in color, whereas the original was in black and white. Sure, there are nice photos. But the information is much less detailed than in the past. And instead of evolving, Bartholomew seems a one-trick pony.

On the plus side, the plant starting charts are still pretty good. But what a let-down.

Two-stars. The Square Foot Gardening method itself is solid, easy for a beginner to learn but great for experienced hands like myself. As your experience grows, you'll use Mel's plant spacings in different, often unique ways he'd probably need thought of. And if you're like me, you'll ditch the anal 1-square-foot blocks that Bartholomew rants on about. By itself, that would be four or five-stars.

But this book itself lacks. It's a step BACKWARDS from the original (though I do like his new focus on building up instead of digging down to prepare the soil). Added to that the self-centered bloviating, well...

Two stars.

[Linda (NOT RECEIVING NOTIFICATIONS) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased my 1981 edition of SQUARE FOOT GARDENING in the early 1980's when I was fairly new to gardening. At the time I had limited space and my husband had built me some raised beds. I was able to invest both time and money and grew some fairly decent vegetables. What I learned is that smaller plants such as lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes and onions did well provided that you use good soil to avoid disease problems. It is also important for you to rotate crops.

Another plus was that it was easy to contain the beds with netting to avoid pests and frosts/freezes. The experience I gained by using this book as a guide helped prevent future mistakes years later. Vertical climbing for melons and cukes did not fair as well. Some vegetables just do better with plenty of space.

In this edition growing potatoes is not listed. Forget about watermelons and winter squash. Small summer squash varieties would provide a few things to eat but healthier bigger plants need more space. My experience with growing tomatoes and large pepper plants using Mr. Bartholomew's methods stressed the vegetables.

So, almost thirty years later, who would I say would have success with this book? Those looking to grow the smaller vegetables. Parents and teachers trying to instill the love of gardening with young children. Handicapped persons that have access to high-rise raised beds. Someone that wants to try herb gardening using caution with invasive herbs (mints) and ones that take up too much space (rosemary comes to mind). I no longer use his book but the experience I have gained growing different vegetables was worth trying his method at that time. I am now going to donate my copy to our local library.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to have to buy this I suppose...I have the library copy. I grew up on a farm and now that I'm, not so young, I have a bit of time to grow things.

Time, but my body is shot, my knees won't bend and my shoulders are week. Neither do i have a lot of money. Still I enjoy a little bit of gardening. Right now there is what had been a flower bed in front of our porch...it's now my basic vegetable bed. Some tomatoes, some bush beans, some onions. A few.

So, I finally got this book (I had to wait as I was like 4683rd in line). This gives wonderful ideas and suggestions many of which I plan to act on. How to build the SFG (Square Foot Garden) containers or beds and suggestions as to how much of what to plant in each "square foot". There are of course suggestions of other types of bed and materials to use. I plan to (try) and get a couple of 4X4 beds prepared this summer and fall so I can have them ready for next spring.

So, handy book i like it and plan to (possibly) buy a copy. Some advice I'll take, some not. If you're into gardening in a limited area this might be tour book.

[Dahlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm starting a new square foot garden this year. I am thrilled at the prospect of no weeds, less watering, and lots of produce! I already have little radishes, romaine, spinach, and some wild flowers popping up!

I'm sure I'll refer to this book all summer. For the first time I am really ready to have a fall garden too. I always say I'll plant a second crop, but by the end of summer and all the weeds I'm tired of gardening. I think this may be the easiest and most enjoyable way to garden!

[Randal White · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been years since I first read "Square Foot Gardening". I've put it's lessons into practice for the past 30 years. When I saw that the author had written a new, updated edition, I jumped at the chance to read it. And I'm not sorry that I did! Very easily understood, the new edition is an excellent book for beginning gardeners to learn the "secret" of square foot gardening. Chock full of pictures and instructions. And it has much to offer to older, more experienced gardeners, too!

[Ericka Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to be a sensible approach to vegetable gardening. There was quite a bit of information and how-to packed into the book and much of it easily done by oneself. Some of the info I will use in my own garden. What I didn’t like was the almost constant commercial-like voice in the way the book was written.

[Janel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a beginner gardener... I've had 3 summer veggie gardens. I'm also not anywhere near experienced-gardener level and have become frustrated with the methods taught by my botanist husband who combines a rather unique mix of environmental long-term planning, old-timey row gardening, and plant pathology, not to mention a limited amount of time to assist me. The result was always extremely weedy, hard-to-navigate gardens that produce extremely unpredictable yields. I decided that neither of us actually know gardens that well even if he has the book knowledge. Since the garden is entirely in my hands this year and we have just moved to a beautiful garden-friendly area (as opposed to the desert-like So Cal gardens I've raised before), I'm making my garden my pet project for the year. It's January, so that mostly means reading gardening books for the moment.

OK, great, so what about this book? Mel Bartholomew is basically the first person to try anything but old row gardening and making a productive garden work in a small space. Yay for intuitive thinking! I love the concept of the square foot garden. I love the idea of planting veggies in an organized and customizable way, of keeping crops rotating easily, of having seasonal crops cared for together without losing track of the big picture. Basically, it's a great starting place and it's worked for thousands or even millions around the world. If you've never read a gardening book, read this one.

But why not 5 stars? Certain things got under my skin. You have to have a permanent grid nailed to your garden bed or it's just not even qualified to be called a square foot garden. Really? I personally find that look very unappealing, sorry Mel. I also felt like he repeated himself 10 times to get a point across. Also, if you don't use "Mel's Mix" to fill your garden beds, well... that's got failure written all over it. I can't afford that kind of soil, even in small beds. Our new place actually had raised beds waiting for us when we moved in. No way am I refilling them with a perfect blend when what's there looks just fine. Also, Mel is an engineer by trade (if I remember correctly) and a consultant on efficiency, and um, you can tell by the pictures of his gardens. His idea of adding interest is planting the four corners of the beds in your favorite color of flower. Lot of other bits and pieces that just bothered me... so 4 stars. It's a great start, but looking forward to another author with a little more aesthetic creativity and a little less adorable of perfectly divisible squares.

[Maitland Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I guess it took someone outside of the garden industry to think of it”

Let’s get gardening!

[Neil Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew with a traditional row garden and enjoyed eating the fruit and vegetables that came out of it. I also observed that we had to wait to get our first couple tomatoes when essentially all of the tomato plants began giving ripe fruit. Then it was time to begin canning. About a week later, we all of the canned tomatoes we wanted. We ate the three or four tomatoes a week on salads or in chilli, but after the canning was done, quite a few tomatoes went to waste simply because there were too many coming ripe at the same time. I thought that there must be a way to change this, and Mel came up with it. I also thought that all of the time weeding made gardening not very fun for me. Mel fixed this too!

This year I attempted to use the SFG method. I also tried to use the staggered planting approach allowing for a 'continual' harvest. To my surprise, I was largely successful. I planted three different tomato plants inside in late Feb, then three in late march, and the I planted all six of these and three new seeds in the middle of May. So, I had three plants of three different varieties of tomatoes about a month apart from each other. So, in late July the first three starting producing, then the next set started about three weeks later, and the last one about two weeks after that. Once all of them began producing, I canned some tomatoes. Once the canning was done, the first three plants were just about done with producing, while the rest continued. The last three plants are still producing now and they should continue until the first hard frost.

I did not do everything right this year, and I have more to learn. I did very little weeding. I was able to stagger most of the crops rather well, and (most important) it was fun and not a chore.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a farm boy who never really wanted to farm, I do spend a great deal of time being nostalgic about my bucolic days in the country. At any rate, even though I refuse to have anything to do with cows (with the exception of eating them), I do at times return to the soil and grow a mess of vegetables.

Unfortunately, living in a gentrified urban area means that our small garden plot suffers from the usual ills of a former-ghetto environment -- do shards of glass count as clay, sand, or loam? Which is why this year, I decided to pull out all the soil in our 4' x 8' boxed garden and start from scratch.

In order to help me succeed with said project, and to see if I can’t get the best yield in the smallest amount of space, I picked up All New Square Foot Gardening. Does it work? The hell if I know, but the advice that Bartholomew gives not only seems sound, but also seems fairly easy to follow as well. I’m sure at some point I’ll be blogging about my experiences with this method, so feel free to follow along.

[Matthew D · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the information in this book is solid, too much of it is repetitive filler and self-promotion. I bought/borrowed the book; I’m already invested in the information, so there is no need to continually tell me that this method of gardening is superior to every other method over and over. Another example is how the author repeats the ingredients for their gardening soil mix, often multiple times per page, and also explains why it’s good for this method of gardening—again, multiple times per page.

I was also not a fan of the tone/voice of the text. It was often too casual but not conversational. It was like an older teacher trying to sound cool to connect with their students, but it just comes off as insincere.

Really, this book could have been half as long as it is and not lost any of the information/content.

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a bad read - just not a great one either. The author (who is certainly very smart and innovative) is also very self-congratulatory and it gets very old/annoying very fast. Also - how's this for irony: reading this book actually convinced me to NOT do square foot gardening. I still learned some good gardening basics (and a few new advanced methods). I don't regret reading this book at all. My approach is going to be to try and blend the best of both worlds - square foot gardening and single row gardening into a system that works best for our situation.

[Teri-K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not impressed. There's a lot of self promotion in this book, which lacked the detail of the original. I understand that he believes you don't need to fertilize, etc., if you use his soil mix. But this book didn't even discuss succession planting by putting early lettuce in the corners of the broccoli square, for instance. I'm pretty sure the original covered that. There's enough info here to get someone started gardening for the first time, but nothing for the experienced gardener except his spacing suggestion, which you can get off the internet.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The method is great, and I really appreciated how basic and foundational the book was: perfect for a non-gardening dumdum like me. The writing style is odd and dated but I can't really fault our guy Mel for that because I'm assuming the bulk of the text was written long ago. I doubt I'll ever see the word "friable" used this many times in one text again in my life.

I would imagine this is a great reference book to have a hard copy of, but the Kindle version was so badly formatted it was almost unreadable. I'll probably go ahead and order the paperback.