Square Foot Gardening 2022

Jeanne de Bont Henk Lamers

Square Foot Gardening 2022

Since we wanted to know exactly what our harvest of vegetables and herbs was, we had to weigh them. We wrote down that data by hand.

The results (on the left page) covered: the date, the amount of grams, the product and the square foot gardening bed it came from.

After that we filled in spread sheets with the data and via the Processing programming language, we designed and generated the graphics.

Early February 2022, we completed the construction of the Square Foot Gardening beds and placed them on the patio at the kitchen side of the house. All three SFG beds have a rack for climbing plants such as tomatoes or beans. The SFG beds are made of hundred percent recycled plastic. They are very solid and durable. The two large ones contain sixteen compartments and the smaller ones contain eight compartments. All together, there are forty opportunities to grow vegetables or herbs. The compartments behind the rack should be used for climbing plants. The row in front of the rack can be used for tall plants such as chard or palm cabbage. The front two rows are for vegetables such as lettuce or radishes.

It is our goal to grow a significant amount of vegetables so we don‘t have to buy them at the local supermarket. And although we only succeed this in spring, summer and part of autumn, it saved us some money. But that is not the only reason why we do it. The vegetables are fresh and taste so much better. You harvest, cook and eat them without any transportation. Healthy and always available is pure luxury.

In this (and upcoming) publication of 2022 you can follow us throughout the coming years. Experience the amount of vegetables we managed to grow. Each harvest is visualised as a green dot in a SFG compartment. When the compartment seems empty, the seeds are not yet above the soil. On the top of the page you find the total amount of grams that were harvested in one month.

SFG is the follow-up of the VHF project were we first proved to transform from regular food to hundred percent organic food in two years time. Enjoy the results.

Jeanne de Bont and Henk Lamers

In the first months of 2022 there was no harvest of any kind. We bought our SFG beds in February 2022. The earliest sowing of greens starts early in March. Radish, purslane and arugola have a short growing cycle and are mostly the first vegetables you can harvest.

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June was the best month of 2022 when you look at the harvest. The trick is to have the compartments constantly filled with vegetables or herbs. If one crop is harvested then a new crop should be sown. That’s how you get continuity. But we did not manage to do that in 2022.

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In some cases we didn’t use enough plantfood or didn’t use the right seeds. It also takes some experience to place the seeds on the right depth. In a number of cases the greens didn’t want to grow.

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September is often the last month for harvesting delicate greens such as lettuces.

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Swiss chard is a vegetable that grows year-round if you take good care of it. The same goes for Thyme and Rosemary.

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December is a month of darkness and low temperatures. Nothing grows this time of the year. Only a few herbs and of course chard.

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