Cash from Square Foot Gardening

   Just finished reading "Cash from Square Foot Gardening". What an excellent book. I bought if after reading a great number of blog posts about square foot gardening, and after watching all the videos on Youtube.

   The Square Foot Gardening principle is pretty simple. Basically, instead of planting veg in long rows, the author Mel Bartholomew, recommends planting in 4ft by 4ft grids and using a unique soil mix. The nature of this method means that weeding and hoeing are minimised. Nice.

   The twist in the Cash from.... book is that Mel puts forward a plan where the above gardening methods can be used to create a cash profit. He promotes the idea of selling fresh crops to your local restaurants at retail value.

   Now this idea doesn't immediately lend itself to me. To start I'm not good enough (yet) at vegetable growing and the growing season in Scotland (recently renamed Waterworld) is so short that the local restaurants would have to go Meat-only for 10months of the year. The reason the book works is that Mel takes his idea to the nth level. He's got facts and figures and objection rebuttals and plan A's and plan B's and everything else you could think of. I take my hat off to him. He could probably walk into the Dragon's Den and sweep them off their feet.

   A second plus of this book is that it got me thinking - as all good books should. When writing this book Mel didn't think he would have to come to our gardens and wipe our own arse for us. He would've wanted us to think for ourselves and apply his principles to our own Sq Foot Garden. Whilst reading I was thinking to myself, wow - I wonder how much our local chip shops pay for potatoes? Do they pay extra when the tatties are out of season? What size is my garden? How much produce would I need to make in order to start qualifying for EU subsidies? What weight of tatties can one tattie bag produce? What unusual cash crops could I grow in the garden? What gives the best £ return per square foot? Could I grow Sunflowers for the oil they produce (more of this in future posts)? Could I make money be selling pre-mixed bags of Mel's Mix (note I have seen old cement mixers available for 99p on Ebay!)?

   In summary, I heartily recommend this book if you are at all interested in making some dough from what you grow.