When you garden in a traditional method, you scatter seeds.  You wait for the ground to be ready to work, and then you tackle the soil.  You till it and prepare it, and then you use your hoe to make a little furrow, and then you sprinkle your seeds right into the furrow.  If you’re thorough you will use the entire packet of 30-50 seeds in a three or four foot row.  Then you cover your row, water, and wait for the seedlings to come up.  And come up they do! Like an army, springing forth from the dirt.  Except there are waaaaay to many seedlings there, so you start thinning.  Maybe every other one to start, but as the weeks go by you pull out more seedlings and more seedlings, to make room for the plants to grow.  Sometimes you leave a seedling where you shouldn’t, but you just can’t bear to pull another one out, because dag-gum, that tiny sprout will turn into a mondo head of broccoli- there’s food in that there sprout.  And in the end, in your little four foot row you have about seven broccoli plants that are sort of squished together, and not producing as well as they could, when you started with a packet of 30-50 seeds.  See where this is going?

With the square foot gardening method, I plant just enough seeds.  And when there is snow cover and frost in the ground outside, I can start my seeds inside, and I know how many seeds I should start.  One broccoli plant will take up an entire square foot, and, at most, I want four squares of broccoli, so I plant just five broccoli seeds.  If I end up with five thriving seedlings, I’ll share the fifth with someone else.  Because I’m only planting five little broccoli seeds, it takes mere minutes to plant them.  In this case, I used some plastic cups.  I used a nail to punch drainage holes, set the cups in a bucket, and then poured dirt in the cups.  Seeds, dirt to cover, and a little water, and I was done- all told it took about two minutes, and half of that was hunting down the bucket.

My little packet of broccoli seeds that I bought two years ago still has a ton of seeds in it.  Not bad for a $1.99 investment.

In addition to broccoli, I also started ten red onion seeds.  I had bad luck with onions last year, so I thought I’d try again by starting earlier with them.  Then today, I was more than surprised to find my back-ordered Caraflex cabbage seeds in the mailbox from Johnny’s.  You have to love that service! I was told they were back-ordered until March 7th, at best guess!  So I promptly grabbed another pail, five more cups, and then started ten cabbage seeds.  The Caraflex are a unique diamond shaped cabbage that is much smaller than a regular head of cabbage.  I have high hopes for it in my square foot garden.

In two weeks, the cauliflower gets started, and something else, but my mind is drawing a blank as to what that is.  I’ll be reporting back.

P.S.  Don’t forget to label the cups, cole crops all look very similar when young.