French Intensive (Square Foot) Gardening

I put the final seeds in this morning in my raised bed veggie garden. It was quite the task overall to get these little spaces prepared. As I only have a small space in the back yard, I wanted to minimize the amount of real-estate used for beds, while maximizing yields. So, based on a bit of research, I chose to use a combination of the square foot / French intensive method.

Soil Preparation
I wasn't fully comfortable with Mel Bartholomew's suggestion that I could put weed cloth down and just add 6" of "Mel's Mix" to the raised beds and be good to go. My hope is that going into the future, I will never have to move these beds so I did what I could to prepare the plots. That means double digging.

This is where Mel Bartholomew gets superseded by years of fundamentals coming from the French Intensive methods. As I have a very hard clay layer between 3"-8" below the topsoil, I felt I had no choice but to remediate a bit. I won't get into the details, but suffice to say that double digging includes tilling the soil with hand tools to add a layer of compost. I hope it was worth it.

Bed Construction
Again, going against Mel's suggestion, I opted for 8" high raised beds. With soil like ours, more soil on top can't be a bad thing. Nothing fancy in the wood selection, I picked up some 1"x8"x8' for the sides and 2"x8" cut into 2 foot lengths for the ends.


I opted for untreated wood, as this is going to be primarily for food production and didn't want the "Chromated Copper Arsenate" in my veggies. However, wood left untreated will not last long, so I followed the suggested of some fellow square foot gardeners and used linseed oil (available at Rona for $7/liter). For those of you that don't know, linseed oil is a non-toxic, food-grade oil that is most frequently used to oil butcher blocks. It goes on smooth and the softwood lumber readily soaks up many coats. I had some leftover 1/2" trim that I used for my 1'x1' separations. These were convenient, but not the best as they are made with glued joints that come apart after the slightest of weathering.

The final touches in my bed construction were my own. As both of my beds are slightly down-grade from my rain barrel, I ran a soaker hose through the length of both beds (about 4" deep). From there I just hook up a small length of regular garden hose from the rain barrel to the soaker coupling and gravity does the rest.

Bed Layout
I added a shot of my final layout and plant density below. As you can see, I chose an 8'X2' layout, other than the proposed 4'X4' suggested by many texts on the subject. It made more sense with the lot layout and my desire to leave room in the yard for playing kiddies.



Row Covers
The last thing I did was to add some row covers using plastic sheeting and PVC hoops. I'd like to take credit for this one, but alas I cannot. You can download some great plans here. A couple of tips with this one.

3/4" PVC is just right. Buy it in 10 foot lengths and cut them in two for just the right length for a 2 foot wide bed.

DO NOT use copper pipe clamps, try plastic or galvanized steel. Copper is too soft and can't handle you hitting it with the aerator, snow load, etc.

DO NOT staple your plastic cover down. Find some rocks to hold down the bottom, so you can get easy access to your plants for watering. The soaker hose is great for established plants, but seeds need moisture on the surface.

DO use something across the top of your hoops to keep your plastic from sagging.

If you are silly enough to think you can get your plants in before May long, you MUST use row covers. Refer to earlier post about our record May snowfall.