New Member

Hi
I am a new member, I live in the UK in a place called Meltham, Holmfirth. I have just come across square foot gardening by chance, googling 'raised beds' on my computor for further information on how to improve my first year succuss, and came across SFG, and thought what a serious idea.
I have decided to raise my beds considerably, to 22" high, 16 foot long and 4 foot wide, this has come about due to my disability has it has now become virtually impossible for me to bend and attend to the planting and maintainace of the bed.
I am now looking forward to the next year gardening season, when I will have my new raised bed up and running, and have read the book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.

Welcome Charles. This is a great site and you will find a lot of very helpful people on here. So sorry you have difficulty with regular gardening. The older I get the harder it is to get down on my knees to do the gardening. The raised beds are definitely the way to go for so many reasons.

SFG method is fantastic. I do a rather modified version of it but am loving it and will as time goes on, eventually switch most of mine over to raised beds.

I am in British Columbia, Canada. My zone is a 3b. We just had frost last week that killed most things that I didn't have covered.

Best of luck with your new venture. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions or to offer advice or share your previous gardening experiences with us.

GK

We're glad to have you aboard. What type of gardening have you been doing that you'd like to improve upon? I'm sure you'll find some good ideas in the SFG world. Although we all are doing 'SFG', there is room for our own individual preferences and circumstances.

If more height to your garden beds would be advantageous for your health, be sure to do a search for 'table tops' on the forum and look for some of my posts about table tops. I do the majority of my vegetable gardening at waist height. Chexmix has just finished setting up a very impressive table top garden that you can see here.

Happy Gardening

Welcome Charles!

I think one of the real advantages of SFG is the ability to control the height of the bed and the ease of garden care. Not 1/10th as demanding as row gardening. And much neater. I look forward to your progress.

Welcome, Charles, from across the pond.

Hi, Charles, and welcome to the Europe forum. SFG is a great way to garden...not only can you make tall beds, you can even put them on legs (tabletops) so you don't have to bed or kneel at all!

I'm a first-timer to a full-blown veg plot (well, since I was a girl)...and I've had overwhelming success this year, so I'm plotting out my fall plantings and looking forward to a new bed in the spring.

We keep the kettle on here, so pop in any time with any questions you might have!

Welcome Charles, you discovered SFG the same as way as I did whist looking for a better way after nearly 60 years of inline gardening.No turning back now.

Many thanks for the welcome. I have done many years of organic gardening mainly vegetables and some fruit, having said that, flowers and herbs play an extremely important part in the eco-system of growing your own food.

In the dim past my garden consisted of four deep beds 14 foot long by 4 foot wide, a row of comfrey with a small patch of nettles, a small pond supporting frogs, a few newts. A greenhouse, and finally four chickens (for eggs only) really enjoyed keeping the chickens helped in keeping the weeds down (except dock and nettles) in the deep beds. Unfortunaly had to leave all this behind and move to a council bunglow and had to get permission to grow vegatables.

The last five years or so I have had to learn to grow a lot of vegetables in pots (not easy) and raised beds (2), have now stacked the two bed on top of each other and in the process of building a 16 foot length by 4 foot wide and 22 inches high (cannot say I am building - good friends are doing this). The fruit is some strawberries and dwarf fruit trees grow in pots.

I am a member of the Soil Assocation and Garden Organic the working name of Henry Doubleday Research Association.

Thats my brief history in gardening.
I am going on my holidays for a fornight will catch up when I get back