Square, But Not

As I detailed in this post, I am an enthusiastic, but not particularly skilled gardener.

Here, for example, is a pot of my tomatoes from last year:

So freakin' scrawny, right?

THIS YEAR, I'm trying to learn from the Tomato Masters.

So I turned to Mel Bartholomew and his Square Foot Gardening book,

because Mel has evidently been gardening since the 

FIRST time there were only eight planets.

(Shout-out to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who helped downgrade Pluto!)

Oh, and here's a picture of the Square Foot Gardening guy:

(Is there a meeting or something where all these gardening guys decide

that they'll only dress in denim shirts?)

Although I wasn't planning on going full-on Square Foot Gardening,

I decided to follow Mel's recipe for soil for raised beds.

It's 

1/3 compost

1/3 peat

1/3 vermiculite.

Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right?

WRONG.

Because Mel says the if the compost isn't homemade

it should be made from FIVE different sources.

And that makes for some tricky math, because, some bags are one cubic foot?

And some are one and a half?

And I'm supposed to start with FIVE bags?

What to do?

Well, first of all, I started out with my bags of compost:

I couldn't find them all at one place, btw.  I had to go to both Home Depot and Lowes.

Maybe a nursery would have a lot more different composts?  I'll check next time.

I added a tub of each compost to my nice green wheelbarrow.

I mixed them up with my little shovel...

... and then drew a line with a Sharpie at the level of the finished mixture.

I dumped the compost in my smaller raised bed,

and filled the wheelbarrow up to the line first with my peat,

and then with my vermiculite.

I mixed them together, and had my desired 1/3 - 1/3 -1/3 mixture.  I repeated several times, until the bed was full.

BUT it was kinda a pain.  And it took a while.

I was getting ready to start on my bigger raised bed, when I realized, duh,

that to make the whole process easier on myself

ALL I HAD TO DO WAS WORK WITH SIXES.

If I got THREE 2 cubic feet bags of vermiculite, and

THREE 2 cubic feet bags of peat,

I just had to make sure the compost added up to about SIX cubic feet total!

This wasn't super-hard, since two bags of 1 1/2 cubic feet and

three bags of 1 cubic feet equals 6 cubic feet.  

(I fudged a little.  I figured 1/2 cubic feet either way wouldn't be a deal breaker.)

Also, I realized my raised bed made a perfect mixing bowl for my poopy, peaty soil!

So I would dump ONE 2 cubic feet bag of peat,

ONE 2 cubic feet bag of vermiculite,

and 1/3 bag of each of the composts into the raised bed,

and mix it first with the rake and then with my hands.

I found it oddly satisfying to mix and squish all the balls of steer poo.

(I thought you'd rather see the candy than the poo.)

The reason I didn't dump everything in at once is that I thought there might

be too much to fit in the bed.  Also, it was easier to mix a smaller amount at a time.

Mel recommends dumping everything on a tarp and mixing it by having

two people grab the opposite sides and lift and mix; since the Sweet Man was still recovering from the flu I didn't want to press him into service.

Using the bed as a big ole mixing bowl had another advantage:  I would mix up the mixture,

and then fill up my smaller pots.

After a very long, very sweaty day, I had two beds and three big pots

all filled with top-notch soil.

But what are those green discs that have landed all over the beds?

Stay tuned to find out!