SODBUSTER
OK. The story of our 4-square garden... We've got two garden plots in our back yard, approximately 16' x 20' each. One we call the upper garden, which we planted this year starting at St Patrick's Day. We had some potatoes and onions, carrots, green beans, kale, radishes, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Also, we transplanted strawberry plants from the lower garden into a section of the upper garden in an attempt to save them-it worked. The issue with the upper garden seems to be too little soil depth and some clay. So at the end of the season we'll rototill it and add some some gypsum to break up the clay, also probably add more compost in the spring. Last week, the supervisor brought home two blueberry plants! I planted these on one side of the garden. So far so good on that, but I've got to have more. Now, the lower garden-
When we first moved in, I built a raised bed garden into the slope of our lower back yard using landscape timbers and roughly 6000 lbs. of topsoil, sand, peat moss, manure, and compost. It has produced some good vegetables, along with a huge assortment of weeds. Last year we allowed it to get overgrown, a bad mistake. For the last month, I've been back there chopping up the weed turf,
shaking out the dirt and pitching the weeds. Finally, it's clear. I wanted to plant a late Summer/Fall garden right away, but I was told that we would be constructing a 4-square garden.
We looked at a design on the internet which built raised beds from 2 x 12 x 8's and 4 x 4 corner posts. I wanted to use redwood or red cedar, but I couldn't get redwood, and the cedar was a special order and expensive. What did we do? I found Home Depot has kits in cedar (rot and mold resistant). We ordered 2 kits 4' x 8' x 10.5"h. The kits have dovetail-routed corner posts and cedar boards 1" x 4" x 4'. Each kit makes 2 - 4' x 4' containers joined at the center. You just drop the boards into the corner post slots and in about 10 minutes it's done. Before we put the kits in, we put down weed block on the entire 16' x 20' plot. Then after we put the planters in, we went to Lowes and bought dirt.
Each 4x4 section has roughly 15 cubic feet of volume. So that translated to 4 - 40 lb bags of plain old topsoil, 3 x .75cu ft bags of Scotts premium topsoil, 2 -2cu ft bags of compost/manure mix, and 2 - 2cu ft bags of Staygreen premium topsoil and fertilizer mix. I think about 450 lbs. total. The little ants went back and forth to Lowes until we had dirt for each planter. One huge trip with a trailer might have done it, but we moved the roughly 3600 lbs of dirt in the back of a Honda Accord over multiple trips. We also used some 10-10-10 fertilizer and lime. So we did the first pair of 4x8 planters and planted them.
Within three days, we had stuff coming up. And in about 3 weeks, our first radishes started popping up. Now #1 planter has the radishes along with butternut squash growing at an astonishing rate. We planted #2 planter with swiss shard, spinach, carrots, kale,black- seeded simpson lettuce. So last week, I ordered two more 4 x 8 x10.5 kits from Home Depot. They came in a couple of days, and yesterday and today we put them together, put in the dirt, and planted them.
The result is a "4-square" garden, with each 4x8 planter on a corner of the former lower garden plot.
It's pretty easy to access, with walking paths in between each planter. The planting was staggered because of the sequence we put each one in, and then planted. We live in Northern Virginia, so I think we have just enough time before it gets cold to get a Fall crop done. The 4-square concept has some history to it, so it's kind of cool. I'm thinking about clam and oyster shells for the walkways,
like what you see in Colonial Williamsburg. We'll try to put in some pictures, but it looks so far that this is going to work out . Not a single weed yet...
Stay tuned.
