Square foot gardening (or 0.09290304 Square meter gardening)

After being introduced to the concept by my old next door neighbour a few years ago I thought that I would look into Square foot gardening myself. Square foot gardening is supposed to be a way of gardening in less space with less work so being intrinsically lazy it appealed to me. The concept is based around using the best soil you can make (not what you have in your garden) in a raised bed. Then your planting is done in a grid rather than in rows, the point being that as long as your can reach your plants there is no need to have a row to walk along so why waist the space.
Square foot gardening is the brain child of a chap called Mel Bartholomew who is a retired engineerfrom the US. What he has done is taken some of what he learnt from his career into his gardening and tried to make it more scientific (or in some eyes possibly even geeky). It seems to me to be a bit of a cross between hydroponics and traditional gardening but as I don’t know much about either I could be wrong!
After starting to look into it over here in Australia it soon became clear that it has not taken off here at all. I looked for Mels’ book all around Sydney I was finally forced to order it from amazon in the US. Getting the book was only the first of the challenges, getting the ingredients for the soil was not easy and continually having to convert measurements from linear,square and cubic feet to metric measurements is a bit a chore. In the end though and after quite a bit of help from Vicky we are up and running and planted the first seeds today. Who knows we may even be able to eat food grown in our own garden later this year.