Newswriting + Reporting

Feeding the World One Square at a Time

Growing more food with less space water and effort has had Square Foot Gardeners enjoying the fruits of their labor (or lack thereof) for years. By shrinking the garden space and building a 6 inch deep 4’x4’ square frame, filling the area with either 100% compost or Mel’s Mix for the growing medium and adding the final touch of a grid that divides the area into 16-12 inch squares, amateurs young and old with the blackest of thumbs are growing their own food. If we can feed ourselves so easily think of the people around the globe that this method could help.
For a woman in a third world country feeding her family or facing starvation is a daily concern.With women burdened with most of the domestic duties and in charge of growing harvesting and preparing almost all of the family food, finding time to till and prepare the poor soil, plant the seeds and find water from far afield is next to impossible. If she were to learn and implement the simple and productive Square Foot Gardening (SFG) method she could soon be feeding her family with little effort. Teaching her to begin a composting pile that creates her soil would also be easy for her to learn. 

Guatemala

India

The SFG box is also easy to build. Women in Guatemala  have used recycled items from stones cement blocks tree trunks to bamboo to create their frame. Compost that was prepared earlier contains the fertilizer for good growth yet lacks the weed seeds that often plague the conventional gardener and eliminates the costly application of artificial fertilizers or insecticides thus saving time and money. Each 12 inch square can contain a different crop for example one tomato, four pak choy, nine bush beans to sixteen carrot plants. As each square is harvested a different crop can be added allowing for natural rotation and little time is spent preparing the soil for replanting by adding a new scoop of compost and you’re good to go. Catchment water is encouraged and because the compost holds more moisture, watering directly where the plant is growing eliminates excessive watering.

As the needs of the family grows so can the box size. In India a full blown industry is born by adding length to the four foot wide box to create rows of accessible boxes that can be reached from either side always maintaining the loose workable soil by not walking on it. With such a versatile gardening technique the SFG system can be used successfully in small scale home gardens to large scale farming or schools to help supplement a child’s lunch program that before you know it, the world is being fed one square at a time. 

Check out http://www.squarefootgardening.org for more information and see global square foot gardening humanitarian projects in action.