I filmed a quick video of my home testing garden. We’re hoping to get our video skills up to the mediocrity of our photography skills, but for now you will have to bear with us.

Jackson (my almost 2 year old son.) is “helping” me in the video. Right after I finished filming he “helped” me harvest some onions earlier than I planned.

I’d love to see a your of your gardens, just email me a link or leave a comment.

Planning out a timeline for each of a few dozen squares in a Square Foot Garden can be daunting. There are a lot of variables to consider.

When do you have to pull out the plants to still have time for the summer plants?

Do you have time to fit three plantings in one square?

How do I get that hottie at Starbucks to pay attention to me?

Do these pants make me look fat?

Is it weird that touching cottonballs grosses me out?

NOTICE: My solition will not answer all of these questions.

Visualizing the data is key to understanding it. This year I used Microsoft Excel with some special formulas and formatting to see where I could fit in all the crops I want. Just click the link below to download my template.  I left some data in the sheet to help you get started.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Determine how long your growing season is and enter it in the cell next to “Season Length (days.)”
2. Add your plants and the length of time until the harvest is complete.
3. Below that first entry add the next crop you would like to plant right below it.
4. Notice the color of the cell at the top of the section you are typing in. As you enter data you will see that box change color. When you have extra time remaining for more plants the box is green, when you are getting close to running out of days it turns yellow and when you might not have enough time it turns red.

Have any questions?  Just ask here or on Twitter.

Square Foot Garden - Replanting Planner Beta 1

Potatoes suck to grow. There, I said it. There’s a laundry list of problems with them:

• You can’t really grow anything in the spot you grew potatoes in last year for fear of disease.
• You have to dig them out of the ground when they are ready so you usually break a few potatoes just harvesting.
• The foliage can get quite large for the size of the harvest.

But after reading about a couple of other methods like this one I decided to try them out.

I found a 36 gallon Rubbermaid storage container on sale for $9 and thought it would be a good fit. The nice thing about containers for potatoes is that you can dump the soil on a tarp at the end of the year, separate out your potatoes and you are done. No shovels involved!

36 Gallon Rubbermaid storage container

Here’s what I have done:

Bought a few pounds of seed potatoes and left them on a sunny windowsill until sprouts were coming out of the eyes.

Drilled holes all over the bottom of the container every few inches to make sure water could drain.

Here are the holes when I finished.

Put a layer of landscaping fabric to make sure the soil does not seep out of the box.

Mix some soil for the box that is half compost. Put 4 inches of compost in the bottom and distribute your seed potatoes as seen here.

Now when you cover the potatoes with a thin layer of soil you are all set for a while.

Soon the plants will sprout and start growing quickly. When they are 12″ tall, add 4 more inches of dirt. Repeat this step until the container is full, add some fertilizer a couple of times throughout the season and you should have more potatoes than you know what to do with.

As my crop grows I will share pictures and add a second post about the harvest.

How do you grow potatoes?

Click here to read part two of our series. Growing Potatoes in Storage Bins - Part Two: Earthing Up