Square Foot Gardening is an innovative grid-based method of gardening that was created by Mel Bartholomew in 1976. Mel Bartholomew retired from a career as a civil engineer and took on the challenge of finding a better and more efficient way to garden. Mel searched for many answers to questions that he had as to why we had to till large areas to plant gardens in, why we had to have big, wide paths between long rows of plants, and why we thinned out over 3/4’s of the plants that came up from the seeds we sowed a month earlier. Do you know what the experts said? “That’s the way we have always done it.” 

 

Mel developed a much simpler, smaller and more efficient way to get the same harvest out of 80% less space and he called it Square Foot Gardening. Mel started airing one minute clips of SFG on PBS starting in 1981 and had a thirty minute PBS series from 1982-1986. His show on PBS received the highest rating of any garden show on the network. Mel works with his Square Foot Garden Foundation today to pursue the mission of solving world hunger by teaching people around the globe how to grow enough food for themselves and their families, with limited resources, expertise, time, and effort.