growing veggies in a minifarm box

We met Conor, mr. minifarmbox.com, at our greywater workshop in February. He creates 4' x 4 ' garden boxes. I knew we wanted to do some raised garden beds, so we ordered a box and here is the sweet beginning of it.

I love the book All New Square Foot Gardening, which promotes the use of raised beds laid out in square foot planting spaces, and you can see the 12"x 12" squares we blocked off. The idea behind square foot gardening is that you can grow more food in healthier soil in a smaller space than traditional row gardening. Each square can hold a certain amount of plants, depending on what is planted (marigolds = 4 to a square, bush beans = 9 to a square, tomato = 1 to a square). Mel, who wrote the book, suggests planting something different in each square, but ... I couldn't do that. I had several tomato plants that were in desperate need of a home. This box has marigolds (for color and pest aversion), two kinds of tomatoes, orange eggplants, hot pepper, nasturtiums, cucumbers, bush beans, and two kinds of lettuce

Once the foundation work is done, we'll install more raised beds along the west wall of the house. Hopefully by the end of summer the above box will be overflowing with good things.