Almost square foot gardening
----------------------------

Spring is here once again!  For the previous two years this has meant
gardening at our large allotment[1,2,3].  Unfortunately, in our new
city of residence these are a scarce resource.  They exist, but
instead of being able to rent one this year we had to join an
approximatley three-year long waiting list!

So, this year we are experimenting with something a bit simpler.  With
permission from our apartment building's board we've put two small
raised beds in one corner of the communal lawn area.  We're going to
try out square foot gardening[4], a kind of high-density gardening
pioneered in the 70s by a retired engineer who sought to remove some
perceived inefficiencies with traditional row-style gardening (which
is what we practiced back when we had a hundred square metres to play
with).  None of the pre-made raised beds here divide neatly into
genuine square feet, of course, because they are nice round numbers of
centimetres, so our two beds are each divided into twelve rectangular
sections of 30cm x 26.7cm.  I am sure the plants won't mind.

The days are sometimes quite lovely here already, but the overnight
temperatures are still getting down to almost freezing some nights.
Right now we have some seedlings sprouting on our windowsill, to be
transplanted in the near future when it's a little warmer.  Hopefully
we'll be successful!

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hobby-farming.txt
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/my-hundred-square-metres.txt
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/gardening-update.txt
[4] https://squarefootgardening.org/