subject: Grow More in Less Space by Mel Bartholomew (free download ebook) [print this page] Grow More in Less Space by Mel Bartholomew (free download ebook)
By a happy accident, I stumbled upon the 1982 copy of Square Foot Gardening. I was very pleased with his concept. However, having a full acre but not a tiller, I was even more pleased when I came across his All New Square Foot Gardening. "What an ingenious method!" thought I. No $50 fee for a tiller and borrowing a truck and all that mess! That's until I tried to actually put it into practice. Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic concept, and it works very well and you should get this book if you want to garden smarter not harder, but there are a few hiccups I wanted other readers to know about before they got started.
For those of you who have not perused the book or are familiar with the new method, I'll sum it up for you: you build these four by four boxes--no tilling required--cover the bottom with weed blocker material, and then fill it with a particular mix that Mel says works like a dream. The boxes are easy, the method is brilliant, but the mix was a different story. 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite, agricultural gauge, which means chunky bits of vermiculite, not fine.
Everything was going smoothly until we tried to find vermiculite. We checked all the Home Depot type megastores, the little stores, gardening supply, everything he says to do in the book, to no avail. When we did find it at a pool supply company, we were informed we would have to pay $125 shipping to get it here from Atlanta. Online did not prove much better because we are growing a garden to save money, not spend more.
Finally, we had to settle for the fine stuff from a pool supply company which was pretty fine grade, but made the most luxurious and easy to work with soil I have ever seen. It was worth the search, but here's the problem I had:
Now Mel addresses the vermiculite availbility on his website, saying that it is now available in Utah, with no shipping. Utah, huh? No problem! Except we live in Memphis. When we wrote the website explaining our trouble finding it at a reasonable cost, we did get a quick reply (to all our questions, btw) and they sent us a pre-formatted response telling us to check at the home supply mega-stores because he's never found one that didn't carry it. My question is if it's everywhere then why have the pre-formatted response? And when he addresses finding a substitute, says that yes, you can substitute perlite (which is much easier to find) but he says don't do it because it makes him sneeze, it doesn't hold moisture as well as vermiculite, and he doesn't like the way that it feels or how it makes the garden look.
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