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Plant A 3X3 Square Foot Garden For $50 (Or Less)

It's that time of year when many of us are beginning to solidify our gardening plans for the upcoming growing season. If you are planning to plant a traditional single-row garden this year, I hope you will consider trying Square Foot Gardening instead. One of the frequent concerns I hear about Square Foot Gardening is that it is expensive to get started. My response is that while there is certainly an up-front cost associated with the method, that cost is relatively modest when compared, over time, to a similarly productive single-row garden. Further, many of the costs can be mitigated or eliminated entirely if the gardener is willing to do the work themselves and be creative about acquiring materials. 

My preferred materials for building the raised bed box are cedar and cypress, primarily for their attractive appearance and rot-resistance. However, less expensive types of wood, composite materials or even concrete blocks could be used, with a significant savings in cost. If your community has a Habitat ReStore, you can often buy pieces of scrap lumber there for less than half the retail cost. Just be sure that the lumber has not been painted, stained or treated. With a little scrounging, you should be able to get the lumber for a 3'x3' box for around $5.

You can generally buy a 50' roll of landscape fabric at a discount store for around $7. That's about three times as much as you need for a 3'x3' garden, so you might be able to split the cost with a neighbor. In a pinch, you could use old burlap bags or even old cardboard boxes.   

The special soil mix is the one item you really cannot "skimp" on, although there are ways to shave a bit off the cost. Coarse-grade vermiculite for a 3'x3' garden is going to run about $20, and the peat moss is going to be around $15. If you make your own compost or can get it for free from a community recycling site, you can keep the cost of the soil mix to around $35. The obvious question is; can't we just use the much cheaper perlite in place of vermiculite? Unfortunately the answer is no. Vermiculite is a heat-treated form of mica. It's a rock basically. Perlite is styrene foam. Over time, and by time I mean a few months, perlite will work its way to the surface of the soil, rendering it useless, while vermiculite remains embedded evenly in the soil.

The "official" way to divide a Square Foot Garden into sections is wooden slats.You can buy 1-1/8" wood strips in 8' lengths for $1.50 to $1.80 each at almost any lumber yard. The grid for a 3'x3' garden would require three of these. In honesty, though, I stopped doing this a few years back. I didn't like the way the slats aged, warped and buckled. Instead, I use 1/2" eye bolts and thread paracord through them. The overall cost is about the same, but I think the appearance is better and paracord will last for a couple of growing seasons and is easy to replace. Others have used coated clothesline in the same way.

Finally, dollar stores usually sell packets of seeds three for a dollar. You may not be able to get the variety available from garden stores, but you can seed your entire garden for the price of one packet of those more expensive seeds. Alternately, variety stores like Walgreens put their remaining brand-name seed packets on clearance after early June, and you can often get them for half or even 75% off.  
Lumber for box = $5.00
Landscape fabric = $2.50
Special soil ingredients = $35.00
Grid = $4.50
Seeds = $3.00
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Total cost = $50.00
             

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