Father Sez

Our very own chilly plant. Come on! Bloom, Bloom!

One of the papaya plants. Soon they’ll be bearing is a bountiful harvest of fruits, God Willing.

The present state of our square foot garden 

I first read about the concept of square foot gardening after reading Lynnae’s post on this subject. She gave credit to Frugal Dad, whose post included detailed instructions and even what the building profession would refer as a costed bill of quantities. 

Lynnae’s built her square foot garden with the help of her able assistant, her son Sam. The whole project seemed like fun and besides growing our own vegetables made a lot of sense. So with our second daughter as project manager / worker, and my wife and I as advisors and funders, the project was launched in May 08. (Yes, our family can be a little top heavy in our projects.) 

Malaysia is an equatorial country. We don’t have winter and have plenty of rain all year round. We are also blessed with fertile soil and we just pretty much have to toss some seeds and forget about them and they should germinate.  

Theoretically, at least. 

Late last month, Lynnae announced to the world that her square foot garden overfloweth. And overfloweth it sure seems to have. She posted a picture of the vegetables she had harvested and boy, it sure looks like she has a green thumb.  

Alas, I cannot say the same about our efforts. Our project manager/worker, has left home and now stays on her own, not too far from the accounting firm where she has now started work.  

The Fathersez’s family’s square foot garden has not bloomed nearly as well as Lynnae’s.  (You may note that we are using pots, unlike Frugal Dad and Lynnae. We thought we would be the only ones, but it looks like at least Jim of BFP (another blogger I follow and admire) is also doing the same).

On a positive note, the venture into farming also resulted in the sprouting of our first fruit tree. An embarrassment really, since any Malaysian worth his or her salt and with a square foot of land would have planted this tree immediately.  It’s papaya. And there are 3 of them.

The jury may be still out on our gardening achievements. We are not discouraged. In fact we have gotten a lot bolder, and have started a project that should about almost eliminate our family’s monthly vegetable costs.  I hope to report on this project in about a month or so.  

Picture Credit: Our project manager/worker, my second daughter, Azah.

 Picture Credit: Azah. The stuff we bought. We have a few more packs of the garden soil.

I first read about square foot gardening in Lynnae’s post on Building a square foot garden. It seemed to be a cool way to grow some greens in not too big a space and without too much heavy activity. 

Lynnae also gave links to Frugal Dad’s take on square foot gardening. And he has written his journey into this in no small detail. 

We have some land around the house and this approach looked very doable. And besides, this looked great as a family project, something that cannot but have positive returns. 

I bounced this idea off my second girl and she agreed to read Lynnae’s and Frugal Dad’s posts. Which she did. And the project was officially launched last Saturday. 

We had some reservations on the issue of the boxes. The recommended or suggested manner seemed to be too much of a major engineering issue.  I discussed with my daughter about using baskets. After all they were about the same size and could be moved around easily. They had small holes at the bottom so drainage would not be a problem. They were so easily available, and besides we had a couple lying around at home. And secretly I was wondering as to why we could not use pots. And we had a number of available pots. 

Last night I read Jim’s post on his version of the square foot garden, the Blueprint for Financial Prosperity Garden Project. And he used garden pots!  

For now, my daughter has planted some seeds. They have been planted in polybags. (The leftover polybags bought for the incubation of the petai belalang and the geti trees for the goat farm.)  The idea is to transplant the plants into pots (for tomatoes, lime and chillies) and baskets for the vegetables.  

So far the money spent on the project is negligible. A total of about Ringgit 25 which is about USD 7.80 or so, which was spent on buying seeds, some garden soil and a couple of gardening implements.