Gardening by the square foot

Square foot gardening is great.

My method of gardening is bio-dynamic gardening.

I’m using my own inventions to create the garden beds and the inventions can be used to create garden beds of any size, any shape that one wants. The material will never breakdown and it’s fairly lightweight.

The garden beds are screened, too (with 1/2-inch hardware cloth), as I cannot and WILLNOT share my beds with gophers, EVER! Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a damn foot!

So not only do I keep the gophers out, I kill ‘em whenever they dare to tunnel through the 3-ft-wide bare dirt “moat” that I have that surrounds the garden.

My lady friend was disdainful about my intensity about those eff’n gophers, so in one part of the garden, I let ‘em go hog wild and they did, eating into the cantalopes that had draped over the sides of the beds and were growing along the ground; they chewed into the squash stems, killing off the tops of the squash, eliminating any chance of any more squash from those killed-off tops; they killed, then pulled into the ground volunteer, 1.5-ft-tall sunflower plants that we were delighted to have growing … literally pulled into the ground at a rate of about 6 inches per day.

All 6 of ‘em pulled into the ground, one at a time. I left ‘em alone to see if the eff’n gophers would get ‘em all and they did. Geez. The sunflowers inside the beds are doing great. I had wine barrels last year in the garden and every single one of them had at least one gopher-sized hole in each one, so there was a gopher Taj Mahal in each of those barrels. Not this year! I screened every single one.

So, finally, she saw why I was so eff’n intense about gophers, then I finally set out the traps and killed ‘em all.

I love gophers in the forest — I’m a retired forest ecologist — as they have their valuable role in the forest … but not in my garden. No eff’n way.

I do love gardening, as it’s the only sane place in my life and Mother Nature is my lone solace for me in this stupid, eff’d-up world.

And that hot springs thing that I described? I’ve not done it for a few years, so I miss that terribly.