WHY COULDN'T ONE DO THIS INSIDE IN A PORTION OF A GARAGE, OR IN THE BASEMENT EITHER ON THE FLOOR OR ON A TABLE WITH A HEAVY PLASTIC TARP OF SEVERAL LAYERS BENEATH TO CAPTURE ANY EXTRA WATER LEAKAGE, AND THE EDGES COULD BE SOMEHOW ATTACHED UP TO FORM A SORTA BATHTUB EFFECT FOR PROTECTION OF ANY WATER DAMAGES, AND USE GROW [SHOP LIGHTS]?? ONE COULD MAKE IT ANY SIZE THEY WANTED TO SUIT INDIVIDUALLY THEIRSELVES ..... RIGHT?
AGAIN; WE NEED TO RESEARCH THE AG DEPT. TO SEE IF VEGGIES "SELF POLLINATE" JUST AS SOME FRUIT TREES DO.
September 2008 Newsletter
In This Issue
It's not to late to sign up
Start a Fall Garden NOW!
New Product - Vinyl Pyramid $30 off
The Domino Gardens
Help Wanted
3-Day Symposium - It's Not Too Late
There is still time to sign up for the long-awaited 3-day SFG Certification Symposium to be held on Thurs., Fri., Sat. September 25 - 27. Come enjoy fall weather in our beautiful upland valley in the mountains of Utah. Plenty of recreational opportunities for a great holiday and we will overwhelm you with all of the SFG knowledge you could imagine. You'll go home happy, healthy and anxious to start many new projects and spreading the word of SFG.
MORE INFORMATION
Plant a Fall Garden NOW
When is the best time to plant a garden? Answer: The fall.
When do most gardeners plant their garden? Answer: Springtime. Why? Because that's the way we have always done it.
In the springtime, the farmer plows up his land as soon as he can determine it is not too wet and frozen and the old-fashioned single-row gardeners get out their rototillers and do the exact same thing in their yard. But from a plant's standpoint, spring is the worst time and fall is the best time. Here is why. A cool weather crop (mostly the salad greens and the root vegetables} can be planted in both the spring and fall. The trouble in the spring is any crop has a slow start because of the cold weather, but once they get going and the weather warms up, they quickly go to seed and there is little time to harvest.
Just think, in the springtime, the soil is cold and wet, even mucky. The seeds take a long time to sprout. Once they get going the weather gets warmer quickly, the plants grow rapidly and suddenly it is almost summer when it gets hot. Those same plants then go right to seed and there is little time to harvest anything. Yet everyone keeps planting in the spring because the winter has been so long and they are anxious to get outside and plant something. It's traditional.
The fall crop has exactly the opposite conditions. You can plant all the same vegetables, flowers and herbs but they are planted and grow exactly the opposite of the springtime crops. You plant the seeds in the summer when it is warm. The seeds sprout quickly, grow healthy and become strong plants. Then the weather cools down and the plants slow down as they come into harvest as the cool fall time arrives. The plants just kind of sit there waiting to be harvested. They don't go to seed and there is no urgency to finish their period of growth as long you protect that harvest from the fall frost or freezes. Now with a Square Foot Garden, that is much easier to do than with a single-row garden because a SFG is so much smaller in space and easier to protect.
So when is the time to start a fall garden? Right now, late summer or early fall in all parts of the country. If you don't have a Square Foot Garden or you would like to expand yours, now is also the best time to build some new boxes, make your Mel's soil mix and have the garden all ready, either to plant a fall crop or just to winter over and be ready in the spring. Make sure you add a grid, an absolute necessity for Square Foot Gardening. Fall weather is usually gorgeous, fun to be outside and you don't have as many chores as you do in the springtime of cleaning up the yard and getting over the winter storms. You also have a little more leisure time outside so plan your expanded garden and get started NOW.
Look in the All New Square Foot Gardening book and you will find many references to Fall gardening as well as charts on when to plant different vegetables in the fall.. It even tells you if by seed or by transplant and if you want to grow your own transplants it tells you when to start them. In addition to those references I would recommend you go to our website and under Mel's column http://www.squarefootgardening.com you will see a whole section on fall gardening. It will explain the idea of planting seeds in the warm weather vs. trying to start them in the cold weather of early spring.
I encourage you to try just one small SFG box now and you will love fall gardening thereafter. Since it is so easy to protect a SFG from the cold weather you can take most of the fall crops right through to Thanksgiving. In fact there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to harvest your Thanksgiving salad right out of your garden-everything fresh and delicious.
New Product
Vinyl Pyramid
$30 off
(To the left is an example of the constructed corner of the vinyl boxes.)
Everyone loves the wooden pyramids on our web-sites catalog page and they have become the focal point of many gardens around the country. People have always asked if we couldn't offer a vinyl pyramid and because of the post and rail construction of our vinyl boxes, it would never work out.
HOWEVER, we have now redesigned our vinyl boxes with a totally different corner construction and we now offer a vinyl pyramid with the same distinct look and construction as all the wood pyramids. Assembling it is nothing more than putting some screws we give you in holes we have already drilled for you-all the parts are precut, predrilled, match up with each other and all you have to do is put them together. An electric drill is handy. The sides have been precisely cut and slightly beveled for a nice, tight fit as you can see in the photograph. The regular price for these vinyl pyramids will be $169.95, but we will offer them on a special introductory sale to you if you get your order in and paid before Sept 30th at only $139.95.
This is only one of the three ways to assemble your advanced design pyramid. Click here for more ways to assemble!
Domino Effect
(above is the new layout for Square Foot Gardens)
Every winter I usually go somewhere away from these Utah mountains and six foot snow drifts in order to do a little winter gardening. One year I spent the winter months in a small town just north of San Diego right on the coast. You could hear the ocean from most of the town's streets and occasionally from that same direction, an Amtrak train would go by hustling people back and forth along the California coast. Another year I stayed in a small town up in the California mountains just northeast of San Diego and because the land was mostly rock it was not only difficult to build a house there, it was extremely difficult to garden. Most people tried to fill in areas with top soil but of course any heavy rain would tend to wash that down the hill. The house I was staying in had lots of property but just about all of it was rock ledges and steep terrain. So, I got thinking about our patio boxes, the ones that come in smaller sizes like 2x2 or 2x3 that have plywood bottoms with holes drilled for drainage and are very easy to move about. I got thinking about designing a garden to look like a domino game, the boxes would be 1x1, 1x2 and 1x3 and you could arrange them just like dominos. At first I thought about matching the plant spacing of 1,4,9 or 16 per square foot but that got a little involved so I settled in for just arranging the boxes in zigzag patterns to match a domino board or game. It all worked out very well particularly because the size was easy to pick up and carry, you could rearrange things or put out the nicest ones in a design when company was coming and put the ones that were waiting to bloom perhaps in an out of the way place.
I planted square feet of vegetables, flowers and herbs just like you are supposed to do with SFG and it really looked nice. It was particularly fun to rearrange them for different purposes and to see how many different designs you could come up with.
I did this same idea once for our PBS TV show when we were in Orlando, Florida at Disney World filming all of our winter shows. I seem to be always escaping winter and heading south or west don't I? What I was doing in this particular T.V. segment was to show how easy and quickly you could build a Square Foot Garden using landscape timbers. Of course they had to be protected on the inside from contact with the growing soil or just growing things like flowers and not vegetables and herbs that you would eat. Today you can buy manmade timbers that contain no poisons and in fact are usually made out of recycled plastic or sawdust. This helps the environment in two different ways.
When I put the timbers into a pattern of a 4x4 and then an adjoing 4x8, ending in another 4x4 but touching only at the corners. Now of course we have always said don't make your beds any wider than 4 feet so you can reach in without stepping on your growing soil and you should be able to walk all the way around your beds and reach in from all directions. The above configuration is not only good looking, but you could walk all the way around it and in the corners where the different size of beds were just touching you could walk over and across the corner points where the different size beds were touching.
The next step was to combine many different sized SF boxes in order to create different patterns to fit into your landscaping. In the accompanying photographs you can see one family from San Diego has actually done this and created a very interesting garden by just placing different sized boxes in different patterns. I wonder how many people were involved in the design and how many times the boxes had to be moved as each person expressed their own opinion. By the way, we are working on designs now for the vinyl boxes with post corners to be able to jut in and out as they run along perhaps a fence line and will even turn a corner to either the inside or outside thus allowing you to fully enclose your yard with Square Foot Gardens, we are also designing them to go up and down in height creating a total new landscape look as well as a beautiful Square Foot Garden. We have designed these unique gardens in the past for several families in Utah who came to our demonstration gardens at Thanksgiving Point and pulled out a sketching pad the minute we started talking. I knew right away what was coming and in a short time we had some pretty fancy designs drawn up. That of course would be a custom job and it took a week or two to get everything made and then another week or two to get everything installed but when they were finished they really had a spectacular home garden. Keep watching our newsletters because it won't be long and we will be able to have those in our catalog page and we will announce them in a newsletter so you get first choice. But for now, think about what you could do in your yard and design something a little different that will amaze your neighbors. READ MORE HERE
Help Wanted Ad
We are looking for several positions to be filled. All of them could be part-time or full-time, paid or start as a volunteer. It is best if they are in are in person in Utah but could be done via email anywhere else in the country. We are looking for an executive secretary for Mel and a product development person for the catalog page. As with all non-profits, the pay is low but the excitement is high and the accomplishments are fulfilling.
Executive Secretary
Mel needs someone that can take charge of his time activities and involvements to keep track of who's who, what is going on when and where, answer his emails and keep everything straight relieving him of those time-consuming duties. She would also be involved in working directly with Mel in new books, new projects and new ideas. Of course this can best and most efficiently be done from Eden, Utah but there is always the possibility that someone who is really sharp and interested could be involved from some distance via email and telephone.
Product Development
This involves taking many of Mel's ideas and turning them into a product by researching what is on the market now, how can we design this, what materials are needed, were obtained, who can put them together and how would we package them, at what price, and then produce drawings, photos ready for the website catalog page. Again a local person seems the most efficient way to deal with this. Yet thinking that things can't be done by e-mail is old-fashioned-we just have to teach Mel how to think that way.
Later this fall we will be offering a plan for people to become neighborhood SFG consultants who can talk, teach and show how-to SFG to those in their neighborhood or town and then help coordinate others in a statewide program to spread SFG everywhere. To be eligible you must become a certified teacher and if you can't come to Utah for our 3-day symposium on September 25-27, http://www.squarefootgardening.com then you can take the correspondence course which will be ready in October. So keep these things in mind. Let us know if you have any ideas, suggestions or are interested in any of these positions. Please respond to [email protected]
Square Foot Gardening Foundation
PO Box 10
Eden, Utah 84310
801-745-2633
Save 25% If you are using a special coupon or promo code, include it here. Or, indicate if the coupon must be printed and presented in person. Is the coupon transferable? If so, encourage recipients to share the offer with friends and family to maximize the viral effect of the coupon. Add a link to your website with more information to drive traffic and to gauge what offers your customers find most appealing.
Offer Expires: Enter Expiration Date here
Forward email
This email was sent to [email protected] by [email protected].
Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribeT | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by
Square Foot Gardening | PO Box 10 | Eden | UT | 84310
