In order to grow certain fruits and veggies in your square foot garden, you might have to plan ahead. For example, if you want to plant carrots, you need to make your containers a little bit deeper – maybe 8 to 12 inches deep. For vines like cucumbers and tomatoes, you’ll need some kind of support system like a trellis or stakes so that they can grow UP not OUT. Then there are other things that you CAN grow in SFGs, but they really work better in a traditional garden plot. Things like peas or potatoes take up a lot of space, and are best planted in long rows (peas) or large blocks (potatoes).

So with those thoughts in mind as you get ready to plant your SFGs this spring, here is my square foot garden planting plan from a couple of years ago – just to give you some ideas!

What will you be planting this year?

So I decided to do a little research. The first thing I discovered is that eggplant is technically a berry! Go figure that one! It seems pretty squash-like to me. Another surprise was that it’s a relative of the tomato. We’ll I’m certainly a fan of berries and tomatoes, so I think I’ll give it a try.

So, where to start? Well, I found this article at DIY Guides that walked me through all the basics of growing eggplants. It seems eggplants should fit right in with my tomatoes and peppers. They need an early indoor start, they like it hot, and should do just fine in my greenhouse. So I think I’ll give it a try.

If you’ve grown eggplants in your garden, let me know! I’d love to hear how it worked!

But potatoes…. Now they might do something. I’ll at least have a good stock of baby potatoes if nothing else.

Now that my greenhouse is up, my tomatoes are coming along too. I’ve got some good golfball+ tomatoes right now and lots of flowers.

And of course, old reliable. The one that never fails. Rain or shine, sheet or hail. Nothing can stop… the weeds! But at least something is growing. And they’re kinda pretty too.

This was in early summer. I should have been thinning my lettuce right about now.

This was about mid-August. You can see where the deer pulled out all of my beets just behind the onions.

So do I recommend this method? Yes. For any plant that doesn’t take up a lot of horizontal space, this method works great.

#1. Start ‘em Early

Ok, you probably knew this one. In Canada our growing season is so short, not only due to the cold, but also due to our limited sunlight hours in the winter. We do have enough sunlight to grow foliage (like lettuce and the like), but we don’t get enough sunlight to produce fruit until about March. So if you have a sunny south window (or artificial lighting), start your tomato plants in late February/early March. That should give you a well established plant to transplant into your greenhouse. Read more about transplanting tomatoes…

#2. Grow Tomatoes in a Greenhouse

You know, tomatoes can be grown in the great outdoors, but they will be one or two months behind those that are in a greenhouse. I’m not sure how many frost-free days you have in your specific area, but you probably don’t want to lose two months of them.

So build a little greenhouse. It doesn’t have to be huge, although you can build a good sized greenhouse for little money as this article explains. Otherwise, Alberta’s weather may greatly hamper your bumper crop.

#3. Don’t Plant ‘Em Too Close

This can be said for lots of things. But especially tomatoes. They are such little plants when you transplant them, it’s easy to forget what a jungle they will grow to be in a couple of months. I did it. (twice) My mother-in-law did it. But don’t do it.

Tomatoes need proper air circulation, not to mention that pruning a jungle is difficult. The exact spacing will vary with variety, but as a general rule, put at least two feet between plants.

#4. Mulch Like Crazy

A good layer of straw mulch will help in a couple of ways. First of all, it’ll suppress the weeds. (That alone is worth it.) Secondly, it’ll keep the soil moist. Tomatoes are heavy drinkers and need a lot of water. A drip irrigation system coupled with a good thick mulch will make sure your tomatoes get the water they need. Just be sure not to over water – that’s what causes your tomatoes to split.

#5. Prune Often

This is the one that often gets missed. Some people believe that the more leaves the plant has, the more energy the plant will receive. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Yes, plants do need some leaves, but too many leaves will actually drain energy away from the plant. All the water and nutrients that the roots soak up must be distributed to those extra leaves, instead of the fruit. So here’s what you need to do.

First, eliminate all suckers. Suckers are the little shoots that appear in the elbow between the stem and a branch. Just bend it over and it will snap right off.

Secondly, remove any branches that are brown or wilting at the bottom. These do your plant no good. Get rid of them. For these, grasp the stem firmly in your hand and push the branch down with your thumb – it will snap off at its natural breaking point.

Did you know that it only takes three branches to support one cluster of fruit? A healthy, unstressed tomato plant should put out three branches, then a cluster of fruit, three more branches, another cluster of fruit, etc… Once the tomato plant has reached a good size, you can start removing three branches per week from the bottom of your plant. Thus, by the time you are ready to pick your tomatoes, there will be no leaves below that fruit cluster. Sounds crazy, I know – but that’s what the professionals do!

Note: For all tomato pruning, avoid cutting them off with a knife or other tools. Snapping them out with your fingers is very easy and the wound caused by breaking heals quickly. A cut is more likely to allow disease to enter.

#6. Pick BEFORE Tomatoes Are Ripe

This is another one that sounds crazy. Popular belief would have you “vine-ripen” your tomatoes. Surely they are sweeter, tastier, and probably better for you…. NONSENSE.

The fact is, by the time the tomato just starts to turn color (that slight greeny-orange color), it already has all of it’s goodness in it. And it’s actually the seeds inside that make the tomato ripen. As the seeds release ethylene (the gas applied to green bananas to make them turn yellow), the tomato ripens.

Don’t get this confused with the tomatoes in the store that are picked green and sprayed with ethylene – these are picked too early and do NOT have all the goodness inside yet.

So why not let them stay on the vine? A plant’s job is to reproduce itself. If the plant thinks it has successfully produced fruit, it will begin to shut down and produce less. But if you take the fruit away before it sends the “Mission Accomplished” signal to the plant, the vine will continue to pour it’s energy into producing fruit. (I hope I didn’t get too scientific for you there…)

#7. NEVER Refrigerate Tomatoes

Store tomatoes at room temperature. Never refrigerate. Temperatures below 12° for even a half an hour will begin to destroy the flavor. They may keep longer, but the amazing flavor that comes from a home-grown tomato will be lost.

So there you have it – not a comprehensive list by any means, but it’ll certainly get you on your way to growing delicious tomatoes in your own backyard. If you know of any other essentials to growing tomatoes, feel free to leave your comments!

Right now, my Red Norland potatoes that I planted on May 19th are just beginning to bloom. That would be eight weeks from planting. (This, by the way, is a crucial time to keep your potatoes regularly watered to get large, scab-free potatoes – read more about that in this article.)

One cool thing about this style of growing potatoes is that you can easily check on the progress of the tubers forming underground (or rather, understraw). I was curious to know just how big my little potatoes were at this point, so I carefully pulled away the straw at the base of the plant. And lo, and behold…

There it was. A tiny little potato not much bigger than a large pea.

So I learned/confirmed a few things today.

#1. Flowers on plants = formation of little spuds

#2. Potatoes grown in straw are going to be wonderfully clean

#3. I won’t be eating baby potatoes for at least a couple of weeks.

Last spring I dug out a good chunk of sod to make way for a hedge. I threw all that sod in a pile out in the pasture. By this spring it had all decomposed into lovely soil. In fact, I had used scooped out some of the dirt for my raised beds earlier.

So now with extra seed potatoes and no place to plant them, I decided to just dump them at the base of my sod heap (where I had scooped out some soil earlier) and kick some dirt over top of them. (There was a pile of old hay nearby, so I threw some hay on a few of them to see if it would make a difference.) If they grew, great – extra potatoes for me! If they died, well, no big loss.

Since then, I’ve done nothing with them (no water – no weeding). I went out to the pasture to check on them this afternoon, and what do you know! Potatoes were growing. And they looked pretty good. They weren’t even covered in weeds! They looked… well, like this…

Needless to say, I was impressed. So I will continue to neglect these potatoes and see if, at the end of their life, they will yield me any freebies.

Then, after I had them all layed out, I covered them all with about eight inches of straw, like this…

Then I waited. And waited. And now, about a month later, they look like this…

So what do I hope to gain by growing potatoes in straw like this? Well, two things actually.

#1. Less weeding

Thus far in the month that the potatoes and the weeds have had to grow, I’ve only had to pull out about five thistles that have popped through. These have been extra easy to remove because the root goes through the straw and is easily pulled out. Plus, no prickles under the straw either.

#2. Bigger Yield

Last year when I regularly watered my potatoes from the time they flowered until the end, I got the biggest potatoes I had ever grown. So the theory goes, if the potatoes are mulched, the soil won’t dry out nearly as fast. Thus even if I don’t water regularly, my yield will be increased because I won’t lose my water to evaporation. But that part’s still just a theory – I’ll have the proof one way or the other this fall. So stay tuned!

Update: June 22, 2008

And lest I forget…

#3. Easier Harvest

Rake back the straw, and there are all your plump, CLEAN potatoes – what could be easier?

Update: July 16, 2008

Check on the progress of these straw-grown potatoes…

Just nice looking plants. Not much to eat though. So after Jennifer from www.alibisrandom.blogspot.com reminded me that it is “only three more weeks until garden time”, I decided it was time to start some corn.

I had planned on one large corn patch of two varieties, but after reading a little about corn, I discovered that you may not get the kind of corn you want if you plant two varieties. In order to stay true to the variety of corn you plant, different varieties must be at least 100 ft. apart (so they say). I have two garden patches this year, so if I plant corn in the farthest edges of the two, they’ll end up being about 60 ft apart. So that’ll have to do. If it isn’t far enough – well, hopefully the corn I’m starting now will be finished pollinating before the later corn is ready to begin. And if that still doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll get funny corn. Either way, it’s worth a try.

So the variety that I’m planting today is ‘Fleet Bi-color’. Its very early for corn – just 59 days. If I’m calculating right, that should give me corn on July 26th. Hmmm, I’m not sure I’m that optimistic.

First I collected my supplies:

• A plastic starter tray complete with transplanting inserts (72 cells)
• Some potting soil
• Plastic labels (plastic margarine container lids cut into strips)
• And yes, seeds

Then I filled the cells with the potting soil and lightly patted them down. Each cell then received a finger poke in the center. My daughter and I then dropped two seeds in each little hole. (The weaker of the two seedlings will get pinched out after they’ve sprouted.)

Here’s what I planted:

Peppers

• Blushing Beauty
• Early Prolific
• Fat ‘N’ Sassy

Tomatoes

• Oxheart
• T & T Monster
• Brandywine
• Betterboy
• Sugary
• Sweet Baby Girl
• Sweet Cluster

Cucumbers

• Summer Dance
• Improved Long Green
• National Pickling
• Diva

Watermelons

• Sweet Beauty
• New Queen
• Canada Early

Of course, I wanted to plant a few more varieties, but I was slow to get my seed order in. So I still wait for Lemon Boy and Big Beef tomatoes, Jade Star and Sweet Favorite watermelons, and Atlantic Giant pumpkins.

Then I covered up my little seeds with soil, dampened the soil with water from a spray bottle on ‘mist’ setting, placed a clear plastic lids on the tray, and placed them all under two florescent lights I had set up. (That gives me four bulbs/tubes set about six inches above the soil.)

So now we wait. I only started planting my seedlings indoors last year (as opposed to directly sowing them in the ground), so I’m still working on perfecting the art. Last year a lot of plants were leggy, but I think I’ve figured out the reasons why – but that’s for another post.

As for now, my question for you is: When do you start your seedlings? Lemme know!

Update: April 12, 2008

Here’s what things look like after five days. Several cucumbers are a solid inch tall already, the tomatoes have just started to appear (you can see them in the background, and a few watermelons have popped out of the dirt. I’m always amazed at how fast these things sprout!

Update: April 21, 2008

I got my other seeds (see above) shortly after my last update. Here’s a couple of pictures of what everything looks like now.