In the spring, Julie turned me on to the magic of Mel’s Square Foot Gardening. An ex-engineer, the main idea of his book is that much conventional gardening wisdom is wrong. Most home gardeners take techniques developed for large-scale farming and misapply them to to their small plots. I really liked his style and it inspired me to have one of my own.

Here’s how it looked when I planted in early June:

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It is a 7 x 2 square foot bed, filled with Mel’s Mix. It was a little tough tracking down the vermiculite, but I eventually found it at at Griffin Greenhouse Supplies in Tewksbury.

Starting from the flowers in the lower left and moving clockwise, I planted cayenne pepper, apple pepper, bell pepper, bell pepper, cucumber, cucumber, peas, tomato, Swiss chard, red leaf and iceberg lettuce, and 6 herbs. In the last square I planted corn, the only crop I didn’t buy pre-sprouted from Mahoney’s.