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Square Foot Gardening - Part One · In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to In the Garden, hosted by UC Master Gardeners.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Mark Fearley, and I will be your host today.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Today, we are honored to have a special guest.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: He is an engineer, inventor, author of the largest selling gardening book in the United States and maybe even the world, for all I know.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he is also a visionary.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: By that I mean he has a mission and a plan to eliminate hunger around the world through Squarefoot Gardening.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, please welcome Mel Bartholomew.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Mel, thank you for joining with me today and talking to me about your vision and the foundation and Squarefoot Gardening.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Mark, for having me.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Always love to talk about these subjects.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, let's start off by asking you something very simple, and then we can talk about maybe how long we've known each other and what we've done together.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about how you got involved in and what your background is Mel and in Squarefoot Gardening, or gardening just by itself.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you've you've uh uh given some of the history, Mark, because quite often uh I'm introduced as everyone's amazed that this man has no horticultural training whatsoever.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he invented the most unique and imaginative gardening method, and it's gone on to now become, as you said, the largest selling garden book in America.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we're at two and a half million copies, and it's practiced now all over the world because one of the twelve different books that I've written, one is Square Meter Gardening.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought of that because I want to go all around the world, and that'll tie in with our mission.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a nonprofit foundation, and our goal is to end world hunger, and we're gonna do it in a very unique way.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, it goes back to my engineering career.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a graduate of Georgia Tech, and uh after I graduated I went into the engineering industry and worked for a couple of different uh design engineers and had a couple of ideas on the last one, and I thought this is a marvelous business, but if we could run it just slightly different, then uh it would become very uh profitable.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I went to my boss, and he had inherited the business from his father, and I had a long session one Friday evening with him, and I told him about all my ideas, how we could reorganize the way we do things and the way we design the things that we are involved with.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Mark, he listened politely, and I wasn't sure whether he's gonna say, Wow, Mel, that's a great idea.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I'd just been made uh a partner with the company uh at the age of I think I was 30, 36 then, and I was full of full of beans, as you know, at that at that age.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're still full of beans.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I wanted to express these ideas and see if we could improve the company, do a better job at our design, and make more money for the boss.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I told him all about it, and uh I went through the whole thing.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I won't uh bore you with all the details of that, but it was a different way to run, but still design the same things we were designing then.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he listened politely, and about time it was we should have been going home, he was fidgeting a little bit, and I said, Well, Mr.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Killham, what do you think?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he thought for quite a while, and he said, Well, Mel, those are all good ideas, but and whenever I hear but I know uh-oh, what's coming.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: He said, uh, they're good ideas, but my father ran the company this way, I've run this the company this way, and I'm afraid we're gonna continue running the company this way.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, well, I didn't get the kind of audience I'd hoped, but I thanked him.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I Where did you go from there?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, I went home, told my wife, and uh we were very disappointed that we didn't get a good audience.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it so happened that was a Friday night.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: The next night, Saturday, we by the way, we lived in New Jersey within short distance of New York City.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: We had tickets to go in and see My Fair Lady with uh Barbara Streisand.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we had gotten the tickets a long time ago, so we were on front row uh aisle seat, and it was just beautiful.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We were up so close.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark, when she came out, Barbara Streisand, and sang, You're don't rain on my parade, it just went through me like an electric shock.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because you had just previously had gotten rained on your parade.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And believe it or not, uh, my wife knew nothing of this, but I stood up, I turned to the audience, and I threw up my arms and I said, That's it, they're raining on my parade.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh boy.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Monday morning I walked into the office and I handed him my resignation.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'm gonna do it my way.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna start a new business and run it the way I think it should run.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I did.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I gave him 30 days' notice, and so I became not only uh an engineer working for someone else, now I work for myself.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I started this idea, it became fabulously successful.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um I became um two things.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: One, a very had a very successful business as an engineer, but I also became a millionaire by the time I was forty.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: My goodness.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, engineers never get rich.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that wasn't 10 or 15 years ago.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, that was quite a while ago.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So um, and then I got to the point where the company was growing and we're doing very well.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And as I turned 40, you know, men go through this kind of stage, well, what's next in my life?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I took a sabbatical, a one-year sabbatical away from the business.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: I had good people working for me, and I kind of said to myself, Well, what's next?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do next?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer I got was you just keep growing bigger.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Mel, what you have just said strikes home.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody should take some time to figure out what they're going to do with their life, yeah.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Almost like following their dreams.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that is, and that's that that's one of your books.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: I love that, that that you uh employ that.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I uh I went back and I told my wife, I said, I'm gonna retire.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I retired at the age of 42.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: The kids were all off in college then, and so we could afford it.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know what I'm gonna do next, but I didn't want to just grow bigger with my own company.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I sold the company, retired, we moved, we moved out to uh the north shore of Long Island, found a beautiful waterfront home that I always wanted, and that was the start of my next life.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I I have one question about your engineering career, because I I you know I engineers aren't normally, as you say, don't normally become millionaires by the time they're forty two.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Even the bosses don't.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: What do you attribute your ability to think beyond linear thinking, if we could put it that way?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this was sort of that.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh linear thinking meant my company uh designed just certain things.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were sanitary engineers, and they designed things that ran through a pipe, like water, sewage, storm water.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's all they did.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: They were specialists.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I was in charge of all of our architectural clients who had big projects like a college campus.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the architect would design the building, but then he would go out and hire specialist engineering firms.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: One would be a mechanical engineer, and they would design the whole heating system.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not just the heating plant, but the pipes that went all through the campus.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then they would design they would hire an electrical engineering company, and they would design where the electricity comes in from the power company, they would then design a substation.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: They would drop the voltage down and then distribute that underground all throughout the campus, going right to every building.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that means we had to meet together at least once a week, and it was in New York City, so I had to get up early every Friday, get the train into New York City, hop on a bus, get over to Park Avenue, where the architect had his offices.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there we met the electrical engineering company people, the mechanical engineering people, the landscaping people, and everyone, and the architect themselves.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd compare notes and drawings, and they say, Whoops, my pipe is there, you can't go through there.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh these were all underground.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then another one would say, Well, you can't put your sidewalk there because I've got this coming.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: I need fire hydrants that go there.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then we all have to go home, change our drawings, have new prints made, meet again the following week.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it was so much work, and I thought uh does that if I'm hearing you right, it sounds like you are the type of person that was always looking for better ways to do things.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's true.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Do I hear that?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, you are.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, uh I was not only a civil engineer, but my job then was as an efficiency expert.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Efficiency.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now be care be careful of that word expert.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: But my job was to find out what's wrong with whatever we're studying, and then find a way to improve on it.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Gotcha.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that's what I did with the arrangement of building a whole big campus with so many different specialists.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I turned in my resignation, I started my own company, founded office space right near home, six blocks from home.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: I started walking to work in the morning to work and home at night.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: That was really neat.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: That was before the green movement.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: This goes this goes way back uh in the uh 70s.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that that is interesting.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of gives me a little step into asking you.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Since you've written the largest selling gardening book ever, probably in the world, and it's still selling many, many copies every year.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: How did you get involved in gardening?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh that was after my retirement.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh going going back to my engineering company, the reason it was successful, now see if you don't think this is looking for a problem and then solving it.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: We had to hire quite a few different engineering firms.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: The architect did.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: When I went in, I said, I'm not going to hire firms.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: They cost a lot of money and they take a lot of time and they're not located together.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at my office and I said, All right, I'm the civil engineer.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to advertise and hire a mechanical engineer.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I interviewed, I find a perfect man.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was in business, uh, worked for a lot of people, had he was licensed in the state, and he was qualified as a professional engineer, and he did all the storm uh the steam design.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then I hired an electrical engineer, and he did the same thing for all the electrical systems.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And pretty soon I uh had to open a new floor in my business, and I put drafting tables there and and desks, and each one of these engineers had their own drafting table and desk, but they were all in the same room.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of going to New York, yeah, they'd just say, Joe, where's your manhole?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they'd right then and there they'd solve the problem.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that an interesting concept?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Doing it the easy way.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the easy way, but it made so much common sense.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I think you're going to see with square foot gardening.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's hear about Well, I I think because I was an efficiency expert, what you do is you uh look at a situation or a problem.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I like to say as an engineer uh all my life, I start with a clipboard and then I make a list.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: What's wrong with this situation?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: What do you see that's wrong?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then let's experiment till we can find a solution to it.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can see what I did with the engineering business.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And with uh with the gardening, here's how I got started.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: I retired, sold the company when I was 42.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do next?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: I said, well, I got some boats, I started boating out in the Long Island Sound and digging clams and uh all that those good things.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought, I think I'll take up gardening.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a nice hobby.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: My mother was a great gardener, my father hated it, but I thought we had a lot of property in our new home.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And why don't I take up gardening?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a funny story in itself, Mark.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I looked in the paper and I saw, oh, here's a lecture being given this weekend on Sunday.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about composting.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, that's intriguing.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to learn how to compost.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I called in and made a reservation, went, and it was outdoors.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: We sat in a public park, had a lot of flowers around us, and we all gathered and um and we're supposed to meet at, I think it was 10 o'clock then, or maybe it was 11.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess about 10, 12, 14 people gathered, exchanged names.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know how it is when you go to something new.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you think of who's the instructor here?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the professor or the instructor never showed up.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And after half an hour, everyone started getting mad and they weren't cursing, but gee, they were really annoyed.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Gee, I wasted my whole Sunday morning here.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I'm going to go home.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they started to wander off.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're we've all committed this much time.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: We all are interested in composting, and probably some of us know a little bit about composting.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we sit and explain to each other what we know?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'll put it all together and see if that doesn't waste a uh Sunday morning.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we did.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And surprisingly, some people knew a fair amount, and they taught the rest of us.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And after a while, everyone nodded and said, That was fun, and I'm so glad, and they thanked me for suggesting that we stay.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: We got up to leave, and guess what they all said, Mark?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you leave us in our program?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they they were a little more subtle.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: They said, uh, can we do this next week?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, sure, all right.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'll study up a little bit and I'll lead another discussion next week.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we did.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that grew into a nice group that was learning gardening.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I got started in gardening, trying to learn the traditional single-row method.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was glad I started that way because it it let me see a system that doesn't work.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it just makes no sense whatsoever, especially to an engineer.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: To your standards.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, but I don't know why everyone else hasn't said the same thing.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: But they didn't.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we met, and then I said, How would you folks like uh a community garden?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they said, hey, that would be great.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: We all have small backyards, or those that had big backyards, there were a lot of trees in this part of uh Long Island, big tall oak trees that threw a lot of shade.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I went and found some empty lots, and I found out who the owner was.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Turned out to be a bunch of lawyers.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I went to them, told them I'd like to start a community garden on their property.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: They drew up a contract and said, okay, we'll do it without remittance, and uh it'll be a year-to-year thing.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: So then I got uh got the land all prepared.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: I found a farmer with a big plow, and I w started to learn the single row system.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had the land all plowed up.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: We got truckloads of manure brought in and a lot of bales of hay that we spread all around.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Got it just the way uh the uh gardening experts say you need to prepare your land.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then we staked out the plots, and I showed them the single row system, which I was learning.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: I started to read a lot then.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I went to my county agricultural agent and I got him to help me learn the single row system.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we started that year with a single row system.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, to make a long story short, it was very successful.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: We rented all the plots, people came, whole families, kids, adults, and they brought their tools every week.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: But along about July and then in August, I noticed not so many showed up every week.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Wonder wonder why.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, vacation, of course.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't vacation.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: There were too many weeds growing.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the weeds filled all the the uh the paths.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And wherever they hadn't turned the land over or plowed up, there were weeds growing.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they grew like crazy.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that meant less and less people would come because what else was there to do but to hoe the weeds?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I don't like hoeing weeds either.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I began to think maybe maybe this wasn't so successful.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I started going around town and I started peeking in people's backyards.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I, since I'm tall, six three, I can look over fences.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I peek over the fence.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I almost got arrested one minute.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, and guess what I found in backyards?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Single-row gardens filled with weeds.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Same thing.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And even though it was right in their own backyard, it filled with weeds.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Mel, I can tell you as a kid growing up, we had a victory garden.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Me as a young kid, and the oldest of our in our children's family, guess who got assigned?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: The weeding.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: You had to hoe all the weeds.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I hated gardening for a long time.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here we are, our business, and everything's in gardening now with the both of us.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that the truth?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: See, it's because, though, we overcame the the dredge of single row gardening.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's why.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hard work, isn't it?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it sure is.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's sweaty work, it's dirty work.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started studying it as an engineer.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: I said, what's wrong with weeding?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: You do chop the weeds down.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I looked at the hose, and there's all kinds of hose.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'd go to the hardware store and ask them to show me all his different hose.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they had hose of every shape imaginable and every design, use for every Repurpose.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: But most of them, as you chop at the weed, you cut the top off.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wait a minute, what happens if you cut the top off?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was too much work to dig up the weed.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And besides, you didn't have to if you chop the top off.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's what people thought.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: But within a couple weeks, I noticed, and I marked some of them, new tops sprouted from the old weeds that were still there, the roots, coming up again.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So weeding was a continual forever thing.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what's wrong with weeding.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I told everyone, no more chopping the tops off.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: You got to dig out the whole weed.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how deep is the roots?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, they're probably pretty deep.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the soil was hard and clay, or in Long Island, we had sandy soil, but still, we had to dig down at least, oh, six, nine, twelve inches deep to get all the root out.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, nobody wanted to do that.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: So my garden, my community garden, I was so proud of, ended that year filled with weeds.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, like everyone else with a single row garden, just wait till next year.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: That won't happen again.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it would have, unless I invented a better way to garden.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And were you successful at that point?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right from the start.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: How did that?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a couple of reasons.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Remember now, what's the first thing I do when I have problems?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Make a chart or a list.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Get a clipboard.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: All engineers have to have a clipboard.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you start writing down what you see that's wrong or what the problem is.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the problem was weeding that single row garden.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then I looked at you make a s a single row garden teaches you to put in, you take a hole, another hoe again, a different kind of hoe, and you run a straight line across your whole garden.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: And your garden might be, oh, 20 feet by 30 feet.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you run a line across, let's say the 20-foot section, and you decide what you're going to plant next.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: You've opened a furrow in that soil, and you're going to plant, well, let's say beets or lettuce.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take lettuce.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you start, you tear open the top, this is what I learned.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: You start sprinkling seeds along that open furrow all the way the whole twenty feet.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: You hope you get to the end before your seeds run out.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then you find a stick and you poke it through the packet of seeds, stick it in the ground at the end of the row, and that tells you what you planted there.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because I learned this the hard way too.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't do that, you'll come back in two weeks, the seeds are all sprouted, and you look at it and say, Oh, I forgot what I planted.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: What is that?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I learned then to do what they do in single row garden, and that's stick a put a stick or a little stake, put it through your packet and put it at the end.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're real smart, you write the date when you plant it on it.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's another thing.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So these are things, notes I was making.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then the next thing to do was people would come in the community garden and say, What do we do next?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, after they sprout, then we have to do something.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what do we do?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: I said, we'll go read the packet.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: So they'd go to the end where they put the packet in, stuck a stick through it so they couldn't read some of the words.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: The rest it rained during the week, and the rain washed away all the rest of the packet, and you can't read anything.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, luckily, after we quit quit laughing at ourselves, we found someone else with a similar packet, and it said, after they sprout, thin two, six inches apart.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, All right, we have to lay down a yardstick, and every six inches, we're gonna leave one plant and take out all the rest.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm a very frugal person, Mark, and I don't like to waste.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of hurt me to have to, what are you gonna do with all those other plants that sprouted in between the six inches?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's pretty far apart.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of beautiful plants on the waste.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: And and at first, what I did is, well, I I I took all those and I didn't kill them, I just transplanted them into another part of the garden, some over here, some over there.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then I got some flower pots, little tiny flower pots, and I put one of the seedlings in each flower pot, put them all in a basket, a flat basket, and put them up on the shelf at home so I could watch them.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know what happens.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: One week you go away for the weekend, you come home, and what happens?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: All your little seedlings are dead.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: They died from lack of water.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, Well, that didn't work.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a good idea.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: I put a scratch mark through that on my list.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: But then I got thinking, if you're supposed to thin to every six inches, why did we plant every inch?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we wasting all those beautiful?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make any sense?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, no one could say, well, that's logical.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: You pour out all these seeds and then you tear out 95% of them.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, what if we do this?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: We'll still make our 20-foot row of lettuce, we'll lay down the yardstick when we open the trench, open the trough, and then we'll only plant seeds every six inches.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, people would say, well, you can't plant one seed, it might not come up.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: I said, all right, put in two.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, two may not work.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: I said, all right, put in three.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that we started putting in what I call a pinch of seeds.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's two or three seeds every six inches.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: When they came up, and sometimes more than one came up, I said, now if we try and dig up one, we'll pick the healthiest one, and why don't we just cut off the other two?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that way we won't disturb the roots of the one we want to keep.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a very important tip for our listeners today about the basis of planting seeds when those seedlings come up, disturbing those tender roots will not be successful.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, at first people said, Oh, I you taught us not to waste, so we'll move these.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No, we're gonna we're gonna waste two seeds out of the three.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the other idea, of course, is you pick the healthiest looking one.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then you just clip off the others.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then people say, Well, how do you know they'll die?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: I said, You watch.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they do.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you clip right at where it comes through the ground, the that plant cannot restore itself.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because it doesn't have the the uh the those young leaves.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, the first leaf.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: The seed leaf.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is the seed leaf.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Then the next leaf, set of leaves and true leaves.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you cut off all the true leaves, the plant won't.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that solved that problem.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is Mark Fairley, Master Gardener, visiting with our visionary seller of the largest selling the writer of the and author of the largest selling gardening book in the in America.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Mel Bartholomew, and we're very fortunate to have Mel with us today.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Mel.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a pleasure being here, and I I love telling the story.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's funny, Mark, as I retell the story, you think it's all the same, but I remember little nuances here and there, yeah.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they were little steps in finding a better way.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what that's what it's all about.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Especially for an engineer.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you can find a better way, that was one of the reasons.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't have to be all at once.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, it doesn't.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that was one of the reasons my engineering company was so successful so quickly, because it was just a matter of a better way.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when everyone asked, and I tell them, they said, Well, of course, don't all companies do it that way.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say, No.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: They don't.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know anyone.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, back to our garden.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a community garden now.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I ordered a whole uh truckload of bales of hay.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: We piled those up for seats, and every Saturday I'd give a talk and a lecture and a demonstration, and everyone would come and we'd build up our audience again.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: The next year we said, no more single rows.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're outlawed.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot have a single row in our garden because it'll turn out to be weeds.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no, I'll take care of it.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: They don't.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: It gets in the best of gardeners, it gets beyond them.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Weeds will grow like crazy.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Mel, didn't you once tell me uh, and maybe everybody else too, I don't know, but perhaps our audience hasn't heard this, that probably the most common time that people stop gardening is around July.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Beginning of July, when the hot season comes in, the the initial seeds uh have germinated and gone to the fruit and people are harvesting.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the weeds come in stronger than ever.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's about July and into August is when people give up.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then if your garden's way out back, it's just a huge jungle of weeds.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you tell the kids, this is some funny stories.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: A lady told me, she said, uh, we had our old-fashioned single-row garden way out back.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was so filled with weeds it was four and five feet tall.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I would ask the kids for supper tonight, we're gonna have stuffed peppers, would you run out and get peppers for us?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Pick some peppers.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they'd say, Oh, I'm not going out there, there's something hiding in those weeds.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they refused to go.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: I can't blame them.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I got over the single row and the weeding, and I said, now we're going to improve on this.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: First, uh, the idea of don't plant seeds all along the whole furrow.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Plant them every six inches.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or if the seed packet says thin to four inches, then you plant a pinch.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: How many in a pinch now, Mark?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: Two to three.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Two to three, bravo, bravo.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I hope all the audience will remember that.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's that simple.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: How many seeds are in a packet?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, I counted them.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: That that was part of my uh uh efficiency and and frugal frugality.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: I took a packet of lettuce seeds and I shook them, and I thought, boy, that sounds like a lot.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'd open up and I counted every seed.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what, Mark?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: People, when I ask, I give a lecture, I ask, how many seeds do you think are in that packet of lettuce?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: They say, oh, probably a hundred.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: I said, no.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Up, up, up, gave them a thumbs up.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Someone would say, three hundred, and then somebody would laugh out and say, Oh, I bet there's five hundred.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No, there's over a thousand seeds in that packet.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't care if you're a family of rabbits, you're not going to eat a thousand heads of lettuce.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you are planting a row garden of carrots and use a whole packet over that 20-foot uh row, and a carrot is four inches apart, right?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're wasting a tremendous number of seeds.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And now, you know, Mel, I consider myself frugal also.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so I understand that concept.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, my wife says I'm just cheap.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're I don't know.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're thrifty, and and the word in between cheap and thrifty is frugal.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you're frugal.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: But taking care of our natural resources are something that enabled us to be able to eat and uh and survive even though now we have what, over six billion people?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is there that many now?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe even more than that.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of our goals I'm gonna talk about later.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: I want every one of those people to have their own square foot garden, and we will stop world hunger.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: I like to tell groups that are in the business of solving world hunger, I say, stop.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Can I digress a minute?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's your show.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: I say, stop sending food overseas.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, we can't do that.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: People will die.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: I said, no.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: They'll get smart and they'll learn how to garden themselves.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if we teach them square foot gardening.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or square gardening.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or square meter gardening.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, that was one of my latest books, Square Meter Gardening.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's been translated in eight different languages now all over the world.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Those people will learn, and we'll talk about that more later, the practicality of it, they'll learn how to grow their own.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll eat out of their own garden.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they won't wait for someone to send them a package of food that gets half used up before it even gets to them.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's get back to the single row garden.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: And people would say, well, we've got a packet of seeds, we opened it.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: They say they go bad when you open one, so why don't we just plant them?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: I say, because it's too much work.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Besides, it goes against someone's grain to use up seeds that you're gonna later pull out.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I then experimented, as a good engineer would do.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: What's the best way to save seeds so they're good for next year?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: This is gonna be a good tip for our listeners.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I write it down, listen and write it down.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I'm gonna make it too.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say, figure it out yourself.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you figure out what is the best way to save seeds so they don't sprout?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you sit down and you study seeds to find out what they do sprout with.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: What do you need to make them sprout?
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And each one of them have their own genetics.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, they do for that.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: But they won't sprout until they get A water and B warmth.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Some people say light, but seeds don't need light to sprout.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: They need two things water or moisture and warmth.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: And light, as as we say, they generally germinate under the ground.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, right.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And but they grow and produce blossoms or whatever.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: From the Well, they need light after they're a plant.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then the plant makes sure.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because we tell people you have to have for a vegetable garden, you need at least six to eight hours of sunlight in the summer in your garden.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, it won't have enough light to grow those real nice tomatoes.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Especially the bountiful crops.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, right.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they oftentimes in filtered sun will have a have a crop, but it just won't be as won't be a happy crop.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: It won't be as you won't be a happy gardener as you would like.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, back to the seeds.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's try withholding water.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the driest place in the house?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: And let's try and withhold moisture.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: What's the driest place in the house?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, every house I've been to in my life, including cardboard shacks down in Haiti, have a refrigerator.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: They certainly do.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you put them in the refrigerator, they they won't have any warmth.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be cool.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Don't put them in the freezer.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: They'll get frostburned.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: So put your seeds in the refrigerator, put them all in a box and put them in the refrigerator.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: They won't have any moisture because uh moisture in the refrigerator is very dry.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And your seeds will be good for next year and next year and the next year.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: And some seeds will be good for up to ten years.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: What do you recommend to our gardeners about seeds that are four or five years old?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, try them.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Get a little cup.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: It only takes a week or two.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: They'll sprout in a week or two.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Get a little cup, put some holes in the bottom so it'll drain, fill it with vermiculite if you have some from your soil in your square foot garden, and sprinkle a couple of seeds in there, four or five, ten seeds, and then cover them with a little bit of the vermiculite, and then put them in a pan of water, and the water will soak right up to the seeds so give moisture.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you put it in a warm place, like on top of the refrigerator, they'll sprout if they're going to be good.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: If they're good.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if if you count it out ten, if you let the kids come and say, I want you to count out ten.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: And see, that teaches them mathematics.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then we're going to teach them better mathematics when the numbers sprout.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if five out of ten sprouted, the older kids you can teach them percentages.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's fifty percent.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Five out of ten.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to write a book?
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: No, on the values of square foot gardening and the teaching is.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think every teacher that has an interest in gardening would love to.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact, I think you've already written a book.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've got uh a square foot gardening for kids.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've also written, when I was in Utah, uh we donated, I made the foolish mistake, Mark, this is how you shouldn't go around bragging, of telling the state board of education, we had a big meeting, and they had everyone there, all the big wigs.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: They said, people that can make decisions are here, because that's what I asked for, people to make decisions.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they were there, and we got all through with our presentation of square foot gardening, and they said, Well, it probably would cost a lot, and I made the foolish mistake, Mark, of saying, actually it wasn't foolish, our foundation is a nonprofit foundation, and we'll find the money and we'll donate a garden to every school in the state of Utah.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that well you you never heard so many?
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: We'll take it, we'll take it.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't know what you were getting now.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, how many are there?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's 350.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, oh my goodness, wow, this is going to cost thousands and thousands of dollars.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we got the money.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: We raised the money, and we ended up, I designed a portable square foot garden.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, by the way, uh, we haven't covered the size of a square foot garden.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: The basic size for adults is four feet by four feet.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how I got that size?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to hear that.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's another one of those practical things.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: A single row garden, you're always walking on your growing soil.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the worst thing about you have to keep digging it up, loosen it every spring all in the summer.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, if we don't walk on the soil, it won't need digging up.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, we all agree to that.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, all right, this is at the community garden.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: Folks, I want to see how far you can squat down and reach into your garden.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to make it a box.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: How far can you reach into this box?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: And little old ladies could reach in 24 inches, two feet.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: And big husky guys say, Oh, I can reach in three feet.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: I said, All right.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: Two feet's going to be our standard.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to walk all the way around our four foot by four foot box, reach in, we can reach everything, and we won't have to ever walk on our soil.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we're tending our square foot gardens from the side.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, from the side.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: And not bringing in weeds, can't compact in the soil, goofing up the roots, whatever it is.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: When you learn the whole system, we lay down a weed fabric first underneath that four by four box, and that keeps any weeds from coming up through it, and then if there are any weeds in our soil mix, they won't take root that way.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now let's get back to our size.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's for adults, four by four.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: And people say, Well, I want a bigger garden than that.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know yet how much you can grow in a four by four.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I say, well, you can put two of them together and you have a four by eight.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds reasonable.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then someone pipes up with, well, what if I want it longer than that?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: They think they got you.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, then you make yours four by twelve.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: But you still walk all the way around and you reach in two feet and you can tend the whole garden to four by twelve.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that was a question I was going to ask you at a later time.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, but uh whoever's listening now knows it already.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, because to me there is a concept in when I give a lot of workshops, whether it be on other topics or square foot gardening, we eventually bring up square foot gardening because it applies to the text.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Squarefoot gardening techniques are beyond reproach for anybody who is a gardener.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: They will listen in here.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: They may not want to do it for their own reasons because of what you've already said.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is the way I do it.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: I've done it all my life, but I'm not going to do it.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the concepts is that, well, gee, the uh we've got a big lot and we like we got a lot of children and we want a a bigger garden that's easier to do.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can I contradict the the easier part because we've already proven, you have, that this is not correct.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually the hardest part.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you've just mentioned that you can make a square foot garden any size if you like to do it easier without a lot of hard work.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't make any difference how big or small your garden is.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or your yard.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: You don't judge your garden by your yard.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is correct.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, when we had those, we had um display gardens at Thanksgiving Point in Utah.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful gardens there, and people would come, and it's it's funny, Mark, because a couple would come up and you could almost judge this man right away.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because he had sort of a scowl on his face.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm not going to have to do this, am I?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the wife would say, Oh, it's so beautiful, dear.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Look at that.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: We could have something like this.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: He'd say, I've got all the property I need.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: We've got four acres.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I would just politely say, Well, why do you want a toil in four acres when you could do the same amount in one half of an acre?
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think it would work.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh then we found a lot of men as they get on in years.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: They've gardened big gardens all their lives, single row gardens, victory gardens, you mentioned before.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, that was I don't I marvel that we won World War II when at home we were teaching people how to do a victory garden.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Anyhow, the men would I've done that all my life.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way I've done it.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Remember my engineering boss?
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: He did it.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: My daughter, my father did it this way, I did it, and we're going to continue doing it this way.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's probably still back there toy lighting.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Anyhow, so the uh we've got the size of a the building block, it's like a brick for a garden, is four by four.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: You could cut that in half if it's against the fence, because remember you can only reach in two feet.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: People say, well, I'll put my four by four next to a a solid fence.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, you can't reach in.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: You what was the definition of how we got the size?
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: You had to ability to reach in and tend from the side.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: All the way around.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't walk all the way around, then only make it two feet to reach in.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: So along a fence, you could make it two feet by sixteen feet, twenty feet, whatever you want.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: But don't get it too big.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: And don't start too big.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: We tell people, always start, decide what you want, and then the first year do half of that.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's all, just half.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I can do it.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you'll be so happy you did it.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now then people, we probably should tell them how much can you eat out of your garden?
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, remember the series of numbers that we have.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: Square foot gardening takes only 20% of the space of a conventional row gardening.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: That means five times as much space is wasted.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wasted.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: With three foot wide single rows that grow not uh uh aisles between the single rows that grow nothing but weeds.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: So on one four by four planted the square foot way, we'll give one person a salad every day.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: A single person can have just one four by four, and they can have a very large dinner salad every day variety because a four by four basically has sixteen square feet.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're good at math, look at that, Katie.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm learning from you.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: You asked before, well, why don't we uh tell the kids, tell the parents uh how they could teach math to the children?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we start right away with four by four, how many feet is that?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: Convert that into inches, how many inches in one foot?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then they have to figure all that out, and then you say, what's going on, cut it in half.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, before we do that, we say how many square feet is that?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then we say if it's only six inches deep, how many cubic feet is that?
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: So as the child gets older, they can learn all these different things.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting point.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: The thing will be way ahead.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, way ahead of their other.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I know that.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: I learned that in gardening.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: And not only that, they haven't learned that on a rote basis.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: They have learned it on a practice basis.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: I see how and you then you the older you can teach them math with squares.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it two feet by two feet?
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: How many square feet is that?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: Four.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: Then we can teach them percentages.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: How much of this four by four would be two of the squares?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, four times four is sixteen, and then two of that would be one eighth.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have fractions.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Convert one eighth into see, it goes on and on and on.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's all simple.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to get me to go back to the class.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: But Mel, I've got about two more minutes to do on this, but I'm going to ask a special favor uh as we wrap up this section.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to be playing this program.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: Would you have time to spend um this this is so fascinating to me.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: Would you have time to maybe do another program with us?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've got details that need to be talked about.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I'd be glad to.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe we can just kind of Okay.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me summarize what summarize where we are so thin.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: Decide that you're going to get rid of your single row garden.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's number one.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have a garden, a vegetable garden, or flowers, then decide you'd like to grow some favorite vegetables.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you're going to start with just a four by four.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, is next next time we talk, we'll get into where to locate it.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: It can be out in the backyard, it can be on the patio, it can be up in the rooftop, it can be on your side yard.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: That is interesting, I'm sure.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of places say, oh, we don't want a vegetable garden in our front yard.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: But for summarizing what we've talked about now, they're basic sizes, four by four for adults, three by three for children.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Make them any multiple of those.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can, it's so small, and we're going to lay down a wheat fabric, we're going to put down a box.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can have boxes made out of wood or vinyl.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can order those already made, and then you're going to put in perfect soil.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're not going to dig up our existing soil.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're not going to learn how to add this, that, or the other thing, or do pH tests.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: None of that.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: Forget about all that.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mel, can we take this to the next program?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: We'll take the formula to the next program.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: We will, and because we want our listeners to not only understand where this came from, but where it's going and how to get there in the meantime.