The Square Foot
Gardening Foundation
Latest News From Us
1. Garden talk by Carol Kinsley
7. SFG in Africa
8. New book at library for the blind
2. Squaring off against tradition
9. SFG Cookbook!
3. SFG and Avista Corp.
10. SFG in MESA summer program
4. Need a speaker?
5. Central America update
11. Mel honored in 2009 Who's Who.
6. Larry Busby
12. 2010- a new decade
13. SFG workshop in California
14. Mel Visits Canada
1. Garden talk by
Carol Kinsley
2. Squaring off against
tradition
Click on the picture
to download article
3. SFG and Avista
Hi Mel, I thought you might like to see this evidence of how far and wide your SFG method has spread (see article below). Avista is our natural gas and electricity utility here in IDAHO, and they have a SFG Employees' Garden to help the needy. My April SFG class went well and I have some confirmed converts. I hope you are well and happy. Harriet
Avista, Employees Growing Ties to the Community.
Employees create community garden that will provide fresh produce for local low-income families.
Spokane, Wash.: Avista (NYSE: AVA) employees are turning a one-acre plot of land at the company's northeast Spokane headquarters into a community resource that will provide fresh produce for local low-income families.
Twelve Avista employees known as the Green Thumbs are donating their time to develop and manage a raised 50-bed community garden along a portion of the company's headquarters campus. The entire harvest of fresh vegetables will be donated to the Second Harvest Food Bank, which will distribute the produce this summer to low-income families throughout Spokane County.
Using the "Square Foot Gardening" method, it is estimated that the garden will yield around four tons of produce during the growing season or the equivalent of nearly 6,000 meals. The total value of the produce is expected to be more than $13,000.
Anne Marie Axworthy, director of community relations and public affairs for Avista, said the community garden was created as part of an effort by Avista to make a portion of its Mission Street campus available for a community-focused activity. It has also served as a mechanism to deepen the company's investment in its neighborhood.
A: Dear Harriet: Really good to hear from you again! Do you have any photos from your class you can share with us ? The more we show people giving classes around the world the more it encourages others to do the same.
Avista Is A Model
Thanks so much for passing that news on to me, it's a great story and they could be a perfect model for all kinds of organizations or employee groups. I went to their Website and hope to contact them soon to develop more of their story. Just think if we could write their experiences up in a article with pictures, this could be sent out to many other different groups as a suggested employee or member activity.
Keep Spreading the Word
Thanks for the Avista story. I'll send you a copy of my letter to them and keep you posted. Best Wishes, Mel B.
CORPORATION COMMUNITY GARDEN
Mel's Letter:
To: Anne Marie Axworthy Director of Community Affairs for AVISTA Corp.
Dear Anne: I recently had a very wonderful letter from a Square Foot Gardening fan who told me all about your gardening project. She suggested that I write you and see if there is any way that we can help you. I visited your website and saw the description and thought that more companies should know about this project.
YOU CAN BE A NATIONAL MODEL
It is certainly something that can be done at any location in the country and I'm thinking that if a company gets behind their employees and offers the space and support this could spread all over the corporate world. I'm wondering if you are aware of any other companies doing something similar.
HOW DID IT ALL GET STARTED?
How did you think up this project? Was it from an employee's request or something that was read in an article somewhere? Wouldn't this make a wonderful article in Time magazine? Our Foundation is located in Eden, Utah and I'm wondering if our power company knows about a project like this. Of course, it is not limited to a power company, it is only limited by the location where two or more people get together for work, socializing or humanitarian endeavors.
WE ARE HERE TO HELP
What could our Foundation do for your organization and, in particular, for the volunteers that are manning the gardens? I'm assuming you have all of our books and videos, so my main question is: How could both your company and our Foundation benefit and help others from your project ? Would you please encourage all those that are involved to visit our website at www.squarefootgardening.com. If you would send us some pictures we could include them on our website. I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours truly,
Mel Bartholomew
4. Need a Speaker for Next Year?
If you or your organization holds an annual event, and you are thinking about next year's speaker, please give serious thought about having Square Foot Gardening as your subject. Mel's calendar is filling up, but we also have other certified speakers around the country that can come to your organization, and give both a talk as well as a workshop. Most experts have a feeling that the current economic downturn isn't going to be over in just one year, and it's going to become even more critical and important that people learn how to become self-sufficient, and healthier through these troubled times.
What better way than by having a Square Foot Garden right outside their back door? So, write us, tell us your date, and what type of event you are having, and let's see if we can't get together and help each other out. Send your email request to: info_SquareFootGardening.com, and we'll respond quickly with the type of event, costs, and availability.
5. Central America Update
Larry Busby is an LDS Senior missionary working in Central America helping to spread the word and success of Square Meter Gardening, a simple method that can solve World Hunger if we would just teach everyone how to have a small garden that can produce many nutritious vegetables and herbs in a very small space with no tools and virtually no work and Certainly no weeds.
Larry was the one that moved forward and got all our books and videos translated into Spanish. We send Larry a small expense check every month to help him get the supplies needed to duplicate all of the material he hands out from his classes. He adds a great deal of his own money to that to complete his missionary work. Any donations you would like to make to the SFG Foundation would be greatly appreciated and forwarded on to Larry and his wife Maria for their outstanding and dedicated work. Thank you all.
Mel Bartholomew, Pres. SFG Foundation.
Here is his last letter.
Dear Mel,
Like I do every once in a while, I did another search for Square Foot Gardening on Yahoo and it came back 8,080,000 and Google 21,100,000 hits and can you believe this, 13,500 hits in Spanish!!! I thought that was interesting.
We taught another class Saturday and had about 60 people in attendance. We generally have 30 to 60 or more and have taught in 5 stakes and districts and 5 wards. There are 14 Stakes in Guayaquil and hopefully we will get to all of them while here in Ecuador. We have 11 months more. Pictures are a little slow in coming but hopefully by the time we return to the states we will have some.
Kindest regards,
Larry
Larry Busby is an LDS Senior missionary working in Central America. He is also helping to spread the word and success of Square Meter Gardening, a simple method that can solve World Hunger if we would just teach everyone how to have a small garden that can produce many nutritious vegetables and herbs in a very small space with no tools and virtually no work and certainly no weeds.
Larry was responsible for getting all our books and video translated into Spanish!
We send Larry a small expense check every month to help him get the supplies needed to duplicate all of the material he hands out from his classes. He adds a great deal of his own money to that to complete his missionary work. Any donations you would like to make to the SFG Foundation would be greatly appreciated and 100% will be forwarded on to Larry and his wife Maria for their outstanding and dedicated work. Thank you all.
DONATE
7. Africa
Hi ALL of you.
Well two of your SFG students are off to Africa this coming Monday for 7 months in Malawi, Rwanda and Ethiopia. And of all things we are on a mission to teach and train trainers on new ways to grow their own food using SFG and other methods ... over there we call it Compost Gardening. You may see some bucket gardens also.
Our Montana Africa Garden test of growing in straight compost outperformed all of our other gardens this summer hands down (see attached file). There will be over 45 kilos from this 120 cm square. Exciting and as we leave tomorrow - this African Style SFG is still in explosive growth at home in Montana USA. What a wonderful gift to give folks that are hurting for quality and quantity of food made for free from junk and garbage. Be praying for us. Thank you.
We have started a travel blog for folks to keep track of where we are and what's going on ... so stay tuned if you like and also feed us more good ideas as we are still in a steep learning curve about new ways to feed the world.
Take care
Wayne and Connie class of 2008 on SFG --- If it was not for this class we would not be on this long-term mission trip
Wayne & Connie Burleson
Humanitarian Food Gardening Project
332 N Stillwater Rd
Absarokee, Montana 59001
Home 406-328-6808 406-328-6808
Cell 406-794-9464 406-794-9464
Web site www.pasturemanagement.com
Blog http://newwaystofeedtheworld.blogspot.com/
8. SFG helps the blind.
A letter you need to read! Square Foot Gardens can really help everyone!
Wow, Mel...you are my gardening hero! I was writing this to you and just realized I had never sent it. It was sitting in my drafts folder. I hope you can forgive me for a very, very late response to your email! Not only do I have a huge garden but also a busy summer business working at our local farmer's market so I'm a bit unorganized at the moment!
I was so excited to hear from you! It's an honor to get a personal email from you! I worked it out with your assistant a few years ago and your newest book (at the time) was read onto tape and placed in Michigan's library for the blind and physically handicapped. I was so excited to find your book and to find that I could still produce a beautiful garden without any vision. Your method has allowed me to continue to enjoy my gardening passion, and I can't thank you enough for it!
Your reply to the reason for my strange shaped fruits was right on the money...we've had a strange summer that has been unusually dry and cool, and the watering wasn't consistent like it should have been.
Anyway, I'd love to do a small article letting readers know that gardening is still possible even with a disability, especially if they use your method. Let me know what I can do to help, and we'll go from there.
Thanks so much, Mel, for contacting me!
Happy gardening,
Jessica
9. All New Square Foot Gardening Cookbook!
Get it HERE.
All New Square Foot Garden
Cookbook
By Mel Bartholomew, Author of the Best Selling Gardening Book All New Square Foot Gardening.
All New Square Foot Gardening Cookbook is the first companion book to the best selling gardening book, All New Square Foot Gardening.
Popular author Mel Bartholomew offers more than 135 fresh from the garden recipes for the top vegetables, fruits and herbs harvested from a Square Foot Garden. Mel also adds his gardening wisdom with the addition of harvesting techniques, yield information, and a kids gardening corner.
This is not a vegetarian or vegan cookbook, it is tailored for overall healthy cooking.
Mel Bartholomew shares the benefits of Square Foot Garden Cooking
10. SFG In MESA summer program
Square Foot Gardens Produce Salsa for Spangler MESA Summer Program Students!
MESA students at Spangler Elementary shared their Square Foot Gardens "salsa" with guests from LiveWell Colorado after harvesting the ingredients from their garden.
More
11. Mel honored in 2009 Who's Who..
Mel Bartholomew, the creator of Square Foot Gardening has been honored to be included in the Who's who in the east for his engineering career and now has been included in the Honors edition of the Cambridge Who's who Executive, Professional and Entrepreneurial Registry for 2009 for his Horticultural career.
He has been also been named the Entrepreneur of the year in Home Gardening for the year 2010-2011. He was selected on the basis of "....personal achievement within your profession, your exemplary leadership skills, and/or through your personal commitment and dedication to altruistic endeavors. Congratulations Mel!
12. Welcome 2010: A New Year - a New Decade
Did everyone have a great New Year? We here at Square Foot Gardening sure hope you did. First, let us tell you the great things on the horizon for 2010 for us here at the Foundation. We started training our new staff this past week and are excited to teach these new hands everything about the passion of the SFG way of life. We get to talk daily with people from all over the globe who tell us the amazing experiences they have had in their lives due to using the method Mel has created for gardening. Amazing what that grid can help people to visualize and accomplish in such a small area. We encourage everyone to have a very visible, permanent, grid on every box. We like to say: If your garden doesn't have a grid, its not really a SFG!"
We have a new shopping cart on our website that we are using to help process your orders faster and easier on your end. We felt that was very important. Customer service is our number one priority that is AFTER teaching, of course. We are also building a whole new webpage design in house this year we hope to launch by March 1st. Our goal is 24 hr order filling for the book store and 48 hr for garden shop items. We are so very excited to unveil our ideas and design to help even more people learn about SFG.
We will have some new boxes available for purchase this year. We have upgraded our materials and crafted some beautiful boxes, many that need NO TOOLS to assemble. We have a new "Earth Friendly" box you will be able to design yourself and decide what you want your garden to look like.
It is so gratifying to look back over the past decade and just imagine where we started and see how we have grown and the joy we have harvested from being able to enrich so many families and homes across the world. We have been so very blessed with each passing year that we have been able to reach out and help more than we ever imagined.
Mel has asked us this year what we think about helping place a Square Foot Garden into Orphanages. We feel this is the area we want to focus our efforts on this year. We are in the process of locating people who can help us and the places that need us the most. Last year we helped the Senior Citizen Food Pantries that usually only have canned goods to pass out. Providing fresh foods was greatly appreciated and very needed. Let us know if you want to help us in this endeavor.
Oh, and just one more important thing. How about YOU becoming a Certified SFG Teacher. You can sign up on our web site link or come to learn from Mel himself at one of the many 3 day Seminars link around the country.
13. Children's SFG workshop in Sunny California
Mark Fierle, one of our best Certified SFG Teachers in California, has just finished a SFG Children's workshop at the Centennial Gardens located in the Orange County Fairgrounds. Mark has been in charge of the fairgrounds after they were built 2 years ago, has trained all of the Centennial Garden volunteers for the daily school tours, and also is able to teach special SFG classes there. The gardens show what we call the GARDEN OF THE FUTURE. It consists of a 4'x8' vinyl post garden box for adults, with a tomato tower, and a 3'x3' vinyl box for children; all planted with a variety of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. The highlight of the garden is a redwood 4'x4' pyramid, all planted with luscious strawberries cascading down from one level to the next. The 3' wide pathways between the boxes are covered with stadium grass, which of course, always stays green, is easy to walk on, has no weeds, never have to fertilize, attracts no insects, and never needs MOWING or WATERING.
The Square Foot Garden itself of course, has no weeds, uses only 20% of the space for 100% of the harvest, needs only 10% of the watering, and produces a bumper crop of continuous harvest. The entire area of this demonstration garden is only 10x10 that would fit in just about any backyard in California or anywhere in the world for that matter. Now that is truly the garden of the future. Mark's class from a local middle school had 80 students in 2 different sessions, and you can tell from the children's faces how much they loved being out of school and learning a new way to garden which they will then take back to their parents. Mark was so thorough in his teaching that the children learned not only the entire method, but notice they then prepared flash cards showing the spacing of 1, 4, 9, or 16 plants per square foot. This enabled them to visualize and grasp the huge advantage of Square Foot Gardening over traditional Victory Garden single-row gardening.
This display SFG garden is a popular attraction especially during the long summer Orange County Fair. Barry and Donna Woodbridge, another of our great SFG Certified Teachers in California, manned the SFG booth for the entire Fair dates, giving out pamphlets, selling books, and providing all the answers to an interested audience who wants to learn how to have a garden in their small back yard, or even on their condo deck.
Alberta, Canada Event. June 19, 2010
A once in a lifetime experience. Come see Mel Bartholomew, the best selling gardening author and creator of the square foot gardening system.
Lecture at 10:30 am
Book Signing 11:30 am
Workshop: 12:30 pm
Call 403-346-5613 to register
Cost: $40
You can get more information at: http://www.parklandgarden.ca/
Directions
Parkland is located on the east edge of Red Deer on Highway 11. If directions are required, please contact us at :403-346-5613 and our "specialists" will be more than happy to guide you to our garden centre.
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