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