My SFG is somewhat bi-polar based on which plant I am checking on.   After about 8 weeks in, I have some awesome peas (that are a good 2 weeks ahead of schedule), some decent sized corn stalks (no real corn as of yet) and a ton of lettuce.  Both the carrots and onions are also coming along, although I don’t think I will be seeing any of those on a plate until around October.   The corn has really surprised me. Growing up we always had really good luck with corn and generally ended up with so much that we gave a lot away (even after freezing a decent bit) but after reading the Bartholomew’s book I honestly did have a hard time envisioning the corn being able to really top out with only 8-9” of root space, but sure enough it looks to be on track right now for a decent height.  The root structures must adapt very well to whatever depth they can bottom out at. 

I would have to say that in order of plant quality:

The peas are doing the best.

The corn, carrots, onions are all doing well.

The Brocolli is getting its ass kicked (will discuss more in more detail)

The peppers I have given up on.  

If you would have asked me before the season which plant I would have thought would thrive the most in the SFG I probably would have said the peppers.  I think there are 2 reasons for its lack of growth, both having to do with the plant right beside it to the east: the corn.   I think that the corn root structures that I was just bragging about, grew so fast in the corn squares that it has either seeped into the two pepper squares OR is just sucking the nutrients out of the soil around it, enough to destabilize the peppers.   The corn plants also overshadowed the peppers after about 4 weeks and I assume  was taking a lot of the sun light also.   Note to self for next planting:  Corn East/NorthEast in box, then next row should be a buffer row of a wide leafed shallow rooting plant (lettuce?).  Then peppers at the western most end of the box (assuming all equal sunlight).

The other problem that I didn’t forsee at all until about a week ago was these little buggers:

Cabbage Loopers.  

They have destroyed my broccoli leaves in a matter of literally a few days.  I saw them last Tues night as they had eaten about 2 leaves on one of the Broccoli plants, and I figured I would research ways to kill them off sometime during the next week.  I did some research yesterday and even though I didn’t want to use any non-natural products, I have decided that I want them to feel some synthetic pain because they have quite literally just destroyed my broccoli in a few days time:

So I picked up some Sevin today and plan on blasting them to hell and back tomorrow morning. 

Still good with the bad though:  The Lettuce I will probably pick this weekend along with the peas:

All and all I am pretty happy with where the SFG is at 8 weeks in.   I hope the corn fills out a little more.  The stalks certainly have the height, as they are above my head as of now, but I suspect they will need more width before they can start to develop shucks. 

I wish I had a miniature camera that I could weave through the carrot stalks just because it literally looks like a rainforest looking down over it, and if might make a cool little video to have some type of video of something small snaking through it with a venerable rainforest canopy on top:

Today’s Gardening Brew was St. Peter’s Golden Ale.

Oh My oh My..  what a tasty tasty brew.  If this stuff wasn’t $4 a bottle I would probably drink it all the time.    Coming out of the Suffolk area, I don’t know that I have had an English (not including Scottish/Irish) beer that I have enjoyed more except Bath Ales line.   This was a fantastic beer.  Not too strong, but very easy flowing.  The bottle really isn’t anything special, the lableing is not either, but the taste was absolutely smooth as liquid glass, as described: “English Halcyon malts are used together with lager malts. Golding hops provide the bitterness and aroma. The result is a highly distinctive light, golden ale similar in character to a full bodied Czech lager.”

I usually am in cohoots with Beer Advocate, but it looks like they only give it a B which I thought it was a certain High A.    I plan on picking more up next time I hit up Total Wine.  Maybe branch into their other flavors.

4.70% – English Pale Ale

St. Peter’s Brewery – Bungay, Suffolk, England.

Beer Advocate - St. Peter's Golden Ale

Headline, SFG w/B sfg

Garden seems to be coming along nicely.  I try to get out to prune at this stage around 3 times a week or so.   I have a list of things I have to figure out over the next week or so:

a.) Whats the easiest way to build some type of compost pile box/enclosure.
b.) Figure out how I am going to create some type of trellis for the peas.
c.) Figure out what I am doing wrong with the banana peppers
d.) Devise some type of cool and/or geeky water delivery mechanism for the box

Let's run down the list:

a.) Whats the easiest way to build some type of compost pile box/enclosure.

Growing up my dad always would stake off a decent size area with 4 x 2 poles and then surround those with chickenwire.  These areas were always pretty close to the house (no one wanted to run to the other side of the garden to toss stuff onto the pile after dinner) and within easily food-chunkable range.  I don't want anything near as big as what we used to have but I do want something so that I can start to let some stuff compost now to use as compost at the end of this season or the beginning of next.  I had read somewhere that people sometimes build "cubes' out of old wooden  dock pallets and utilize the inside of that.  Although that sounds like a great idea with some decently readily available materials, it still sounds a little too big.  I am thinking more of a 4' cubed space would be all I need for 2 or even 3 4x4 boxes.  Still thinking on this.

b.) Figure out how I am going to create some type of trellis for the peas.

The peas are starting to get to a height in which I need to start thinking about some type of trellis for them to attach to.   Some type of per square enclosure that sits on top of the grid sounds like the logical explanation, but with the fact that within the 1' x 1' square I have 16 different plants leads me to think some type of dowel rod system might be the best option.  Not sure how much thin ones would cost, nor if they would stay up, but I might experiment with 1 of the 4 squares and see.

c.) Figure out what I am doing wrong with the banana peppers

No clue whats up with my banana peppers.  The corn, peas and Lettuce in that box seem to be doing very well, I have no clue why the banana pepper plants have not taken off.   Will do more net research, maybe it is the climate, and location here in Ga that stifles them.

d.) Devise some type of cool and/or geeky water delivery mechanism for the box

I ordered this book, hoping to shed some light on self watering pots and irrigation system that I could adapt to the Square Foot Gardening technique.  Right now I have 2 small sprinklers that I have positioned in the middle of each box.  I want to do something more cooler/creative with the way I water the boxes.  Not anything expensive, something relatively cheap, but none the less something different than normalSFG Boxes.  I have two ideas that include drip or small spray lines either attached to the trellis itself branching from a Y adapter on the box.  One ideas is just too create a spray line with enough force to propel water down a specific row of the grid. 4 on 2 sides of the box.  Something akin to the vegetable sprayers you might see running above the produce section of the grocery store, but 8 of them (4 to a side) on two sides of the box.  the second idea is just running a small spray line across the already in place griding, which makes a ton of sense, I just wonder if it will get in the way of trellis (b from above) or if I ever needed to cover the boxes somehow from varmints.   I love saying varmints.

method 1:

method 2:

The Beer for today's gardening was:

Baltika #4 Dark Lager - 5.6% - European (Russian) Dark Lager 500ml 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltika_Breweries

Opinion:  It tasted a lot darker than it really was.  I honestly have no clue how long this bottle sat on the shelf, but it was certainly a darker dark lager in taste.  The Baltika #9 Pale Ale is on my hit list of beers to try.   The #4 wasn't a bad beer by any means, but I don't know if it was something that I would drink everyday if my only job was to sit on a corner next to the lotto shop in my jean jacket with a bunch of older other out of work people on the streets of Moscow and drink all day.   If I were doing that then you know all the other older Russian gents would probably make me leave because I would be whistling The Scorpions all the time and making really bad lyrical-geolocational jokes on the lyrics.

Headline, SFG w/B sfg

I come from a very long line of farmers.  My great grandfather was around till I was around 8 or 9 years old.  90% of the time that I remember being over at his house I was out in the field behind his house picking something, while he and my father tilled.   My grandfather was a plant pathologist who worked for a seed company until his retirement.  He has my great grandfather's farming background coupled with textbook history of seed and plant hybridizing.  My father, although a CPA by trade, pretty much did one thing when he got home from work, change clothes and head to check on the garden.  Me and my brother pretty much lived in the garden up until we were about 12.  So I think it was only natural that when we moved to Cumming that I would want to have my own garden.   We have been at our house for about 5 years.  One of the reasons we bought the house was the backyard and it's previous tenets a few decades ago.  Our neighborhood was built on a horse/cow field (as was pretty much every neighborhood from Cumming to Crabapple ) and the grass was pretty much being fertilized constantly for the past century, which has provided some pretty outstanding grass.   The grass has been so good in fact that it has took me almost 3 years to even consider tilling some of it under for a garden.   I have also envisioned it being a selling point for our house some time in the future, and I figured a half acre garden in the backyard might deter some buyers.

With my daughter, my work, and a whole slew of other coding projects, I was honestly worried that I also did not have the proper time to alot to a garden.  I sat on the idea up until a few months ago when I ran across an unheard of (to me) methodology for gardening called Square Foot Gardening.   It was pioneered by Mel Bartholomew back in the early 80s and Mel has gone on to write many books, tons of gardening shows, teach classes, etc about the method for a long time. Since he has been continously developing this method for the past 30-ish years, he has refined it fairly well, which is why his book is pretty well up-to-date with the latest changes and things he has learned from conversing with other Square Foot Gardeners over the years.  You can find the book here on Amz.

There are tons of small advantages that this gardening style has, but the main two that really drew me into trying it were the dynamic footprint and size of the garden (build as many boxes as you want) and the fact that I didn't have to worry about Ga Clay or ripping up any of our grass.  The soil mixtures are combined from multiple external sources and added to the box.  So the only footprint your garden will really have is a however many boxes you build x 16 foot sq of dead grass (boxes could stack also, but I wasn't that adventurous) whereever you want in your back yard.

Around May 15th I went and purchased the wood I needed for my two boxes.  I decided to start with 2 this year, add another in the fall and then another 1 or 2 next spring.  I didn't want to overextend myself and also would give me enough room to grow a decent amount of crop and also leave some room for my daughter to plant whatever she wanted.

I went to Home Depot and picked up 4 8' 2x8 pieces of non-treated white oak (or white wood).  I was going to go with cedar but I wanted to keep as low of a budget on these first few boxes as I could to experiment and see if I really wanted to create more boxes in the future.   The cedar ended up being about twice as much.  Every forum I have read, and also the book, stress non-treated wood which makes sense, but also does give way to rotting of the wood a little quicker.  if I had to do it all over again I would prob get cedar, but regardless I think the white oak will last for a good while.

I followed the pretty standard edge-on-edge design for the boxes and also utilized a decent amount of weed blocking fabric on the bottom of each box.  The boxes are 8" high because I wanted to be able to grow smaller potatoes and carrots.  I think once you get to 10-12" height boxes it gets harder to work in and costs a decent bit more to fill with the initial "Mel's mix".

After building I went with the recipe for Mel's Mix found in the book.  It consists of parts Peat moss, multiple types of compost, and instead of Vermiculite I used Perilite.  When I went to Lowe's garden center to ask about Vermiculite the garden manager gave me a very weird face and said they didn't carry it.   The face was so weird that I went home to do some research on it.   It was one of those "Are you fucking crazy" faces that kinda throws you back.  It turns out that within the SFG community and also the gardening community as a whole that some believe that some types of vermiculite can be carcinogenic.   I ended up going with the Perilite not because of the potential for carcinogens but just because it was a lot easier to find and cheaper.  The Perilite seems to be a lot more 'floatable' than the vermiculite (you can see the perilite as the white spots in the pics) and when you get a decent amount of water it does float like crazy.   The Vermiculite is supposedly a lot heavier and doesn't bubble up in your garden as much.   I might try it with my other boxes if it is readily available and cheap, but I am fine with the Perilite for now.

So after getting both boxes filled I put on the lattice grid on each box to create a 4x4 1' grid on each box.  The lattice grid is surprisingly not only helpful in separating out crops, but can also be used as a base for different additions to the box for example - for my peas I am going to be building lattice using it was the base.

One thing that really makes sense about a Square Foot Garden is not only that your soil is going to be available to you for next season, but that it is extremely easy to rotate crops every season.  you quite literally just move your grid around.  I planted during the first full week of my garden being ready and took some notes as to what I was planting and where.   These were just some snapshots I took with my phone and pop'd onto my Evernote account so excuse the misspellings and general messyness of them:

So as of now, I am on week 4 of the garden.  Things are progressing very well and I have already started to thin out some of the lettuce and pepper shoots from both of the boxes.  So even after reading all this you maybe wondering where I get theSFG w/B moniker that is the "theme/category" of all this post and future SFG Posts.  Well SFG w/B is my own addition to the pedology of (S)quare (F)oot (G)ardening and it is my addition for documenting my experience with my SFG .  It stands for Square Foot Gardening with Beer.  Like my father before me, when I get home from work the first thing I have done for the past 3 weeks is kiss my wife and daughter, change clothes, grab a beer and head with my daughter out to the garden.    Last week I went to our local Harry's and stocked up on single bottles of international brews that I have never tried. My goal for this series of posts is to not only chronicle how well the SFG is doing (and what I am doing right/wrong) but also to give my opinion every few days on a new beer I am trying.  It really is a combination of two of my favorite things; Gardening and Trying new Beers.  Maybe one day these two hobbies may manifest themselves into growing my own hops or something.  We shall see.

Here is a shot of Box 1 and Box 2.  You can see Box 1 is really taking off.  The Corn in the top half of the box is about 8" high as of now.  Coincidentally I just heard a coworker describe 'Knee High by the 4th of July' (never heard) and I am really hoping I am on track for that goal.  If anything I will pull a win from my daughter (28"-ish tall).  Box 1 really seems to be producing, the peas are doing very well.  I think the lettuce might be lagging some, but everything I have read says that the Peppers have not hit their stride until week 6, so I am holding out on them for a few weeks.  Box 2 is taking it slower except for the carrots, but everything in that box is a little slower to mature and I didn't plant that box until a week after Box 1.  

Box 1:

Box 2:

I don't have a beer review yet, but I think you can expect that it will be part of the next update.   Cheers.

Headline, SFG w/B sfg